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This website

Over the past twenty-five or so years, I've had a presence at www.digital-scurf.org for most of the time. Since I changed my hosting setup in early 2024 I've not really had anything of value on this site until the new setup in early 2026.

My goal with this website is to host my blog again, to provide a space for my projects (of which this site is the first) and to also provide space for me to more long-form writing in the future.

In order to have a site which didn't make me too sad, it needed to be static content when at rest, and I settled on Zola after assessing a number of SSGs for suitability.

I settled on Zola because, in part, it was opinionated on matters I cared little about, and flexible on matters I care about. It is not perfect, nothing is, however its template language is tera which I am already familiar with, whereas Hugo (the main competitor to Zola in my mind) uses Go's text/template and html/template formats which I'm not particularly fond of.

Once I'd settled on Zola, I needed a basic HTML and CSS setup, and I ended up choosing Bootstrap because I already had some familiarity with older versions of it, and because it's reasonably licensed and well documented. I'm sure that, over time, I'll end up mucking about with the CSS, but for now it's "good enough".

Finally, for blog comments (and possibly discussion about projects or articles in the future) I decided to integrate with the Mastodon instance that I run for myself. I've assumed that any pages I want discussions for, I'll end up posting about.

Once I'm prepared to let others look at the source, I'll update this page with info on where to find the git repository etc.