683: Website Speedrun

The episode begins with a sponsor plug for Scribe, a platform designed to capture operational procedures and convert them into team guides. The host describes experimenting with Scribe on their own infrastructure, illustrating its ability to log steps taken during tasks like VM snapshots. The platform can redact sensitive info and display real-time guidance for users, embedding operational context into AI agents to improve accuracy. The host promotes a special offer linked to unplugged, emphasizing Scribe’s utility for team knowledge retention and automation.

Chris, Wes, and Brent introduce themselves and outline the episode’s theme: Brent’s challenge to build a great website within two hours, utilizing a tool that resembles a Linux utility rather than a modern web framework. They mention sponsors including Managed Nebula from Define Networking, a decentralized VPN built on open-source Nebula, highlighting its control, encryption, and enterprise-level resilience, with a link to support the show. The hosts also discuss Texas Linux Fest, reflecting on affordability issues that prevent their attendance this year. They express their admiration for grassroots Linux communities and note the importance of such events.

Brent recounts waking up inspired to build a new website, recalling his 2012 project built with WordPress, which served as his photography portfolio. He describes the advantages back then: control, ease of self-hosting, and customization via plugins, especially for image galleries. Brent admits the site has become outdated and irrelevant after years of not updating it, especially since he no longer does photography. He shares his motivation to start fresh, emphasizing the need for speed and simplicity, and his recognition that waiting would cause the inspiration to fade.

Brent discusses considering Hugo as his static site generator of choice, based on previous positive experience. He also explores alternatives like Zola, a newcomer written in Rust, favored for its simplicity and speed. Brent uses AI tools to compare different generators, preferring Zola because it offers a minimal setup with a single binary, no dependency bloat, and quick performance, especially important on a slow internet connection. He praises Zola’s use of the Terra template engine, which resembles other popular engines, and describes his goal of building a minimal, fast, and easy-to-maintain site.

Brent starts the process by instructing an AI assistant to gather public information about himself, resulting in a simple, attractive landing page that features his face and links. He emphasizes speed and ease, deploying his site to GitHub Pages after minimal customization. Brent notes that Zola’s simplicity outweighed its slightly limited templating capabilities, and he appreciates how fast and responsive the build process is—refreshing the page almost instantly after edits. He also highlights the advantage of local, offline development, especially with poor network conditions, which made the process more enjoyable and efficient than his past WordPress experience.

Wes attempts to clone the Jupiter Broadcasting site using Zola, running it locally on his laptop. Surprisingly, this works well: the site loads fast, functions correctly, and looks very similar to the original built with Hugo. They discuss differences in templating flexibility, noting that Hugo offers more dynamic content handling and complex templating features, but Zola’s approach is straightforward and effective for many use cases. They agree that Zola is suitable for simple personal sites, portfolios, or dashboards, while Hugo remains better for more complex, feature-rich websites. Both hosts express their optimism about Zola’s future development and its role as a lightweight alternative.