From Astro to Zola

2026-06-18

fn main() {
    println!("Hello world!");
}

TL;DR: I've re-written my personal website using Zola, replacing Astro.

While reading corrode's Migrating from Go to Rust I came across blainsmith's website and liked how it felt like no byte was wasted.

I checked out the source code for the website and found out it was using Zola, a static site generator (SSG).

Astro has served my needs well, and I still like the framework for many usecases, but I now feel its overkill for my blog.

I've had this thought popup for a while now to try a plain HTML, CSS and JS setup, but after trying Zola, I don't feel any need to.

Zola is minimal, while still having everything I want, while needing basically no setup. Here are Zola's main selling points for a general overview:

• Single executable: Everything you need to build and work on a Zola project is inside a single executable. There are binarys available for basically any platform (Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, Windows).

• Fast: The average Zola website will be generated in less than a second.

• Intuitive: Learning how to use the CLI, template engine, etc, is very easy.

• Augmented Markdown: Zola comes with shortcodes and internal links to make writing content in Markdown a lot nicer and fault tolerant.

The old website will remain up under astro.larsvh.dev as I probably wont be porting the content on there over to here. Its still usefull content though.