Setting Up This Website

Sep 12, 2021

Inspiration

I have wanted to set up a personal website for ages. But, I have repeatedly put it off for one reason or another. Recently, I found Xe’s Blog, and it inspired me to try to create a website again.

Process

In order to make this as easy as possible, I have decided to use a static site generator. After some research, I decided to go with Zola for the following reasons:

• It is written in Rust.
• It seems feature rich and easy to use.
• It is the most starred static generator written in Rust.

To start, I cloned my super old git pages repository from 2017.

git clone https://github.com/TheNumberOne/TheNumberOne.github.io
git branch main
git checkout main

To install Zola, I wanted to use Nix. So, I first installed Nix:

paru -Syu nix

# TBH, I did this in vim. This is to fix an issue with nix on non-nixos systems.
# https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/2311
sudo sed -i 's/# sandbox = false/sandbox = false/' /etc/nix/nix.conf 

sudo systemctl enable --now nix-daemon.service
sudo gpasswd -a $USER nix-users

# logging out and back in is probably sufficient
reboot

nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable
nix-channel --update

I can now temporarily install Zola using nix-shell -p zola. I initialized everything with zola init. I then followed Zola’s guide to set up some basic pages. After getting this page and a couple other pages working, it was time to deploy :smile:.

First, I created .github/workflows/main.yml as suggested by https://www.getzola.org/documentation/deployment/github-pages/. I then created a github token to add to my repository’s secrets, and not too long after I had this website working on github pages.

Custom Domain

Next, I wanted to setup a custom domain. First, I bought thenumeral.one from NameCheap. Then, I changed the github page settings to use my domain.

Finally, I added two cname records in NameCheap

After waiting around 20 minutes, this website was working!