Moving the blog from Jekyll to Zola

This site doesn't run on Jekyll anymore. As of this week azathought.com is built with Zola, a static site generator written in Rust. The main reason I switched is build speed.

Jekyll served me well for a lot of years. It's the default for GitHub Pages and it has a plugin for just about anything. Day to day writing was fine, but whenever I went to do devops work or make a hosting change I had to wade back into Ruby version management, bundle folders, and a Gemfile.lock that's over a hundred lines long. That got more cumbersome every time, and the builds were slow on top of it. For a blog that's just Markdown and a few templates, it was a lot of moving parts.

Given that Claude Code is doing most of the changes, it might seem silly that I care. Here's my stance: simplifying and reducing tech debt is always a good call. My approach of using static sites rather than live web apps helps reduce my vulnerability surface area but I still want to keep the tech debt low so that I have less to do as part of patching and maintaining projects.

The numbers

Here are the numbers for the 4 sites i've moved over. The build time is down to 6.4 seconds from over 2 minutes. The biggest speed up win is my private RPG wiki site which has many more pages to crunch through.