My First Blog Post

Finally, I came around to create my own little room on the web. I cannot imagine there being a better use of my time than creating a nice little blog and enjoying to avoid writing my master's thesis! :D

Anyway, this first post should be about the process of creating this site, my thoughts and preferences for it, and whatever else I'll come up with.

Inspiration

In the middle of 2025, I started reading Steve Klabnik's blog, for very interesing thoughts on the Rust programming language and AI. Inevitably, I got motivated to create a similar blog for myself, in which I can just poop out all the badly fleshed-out thoughts that I have without needing to rely on ancient and difficult-to-share technology like these smelly, not at all fire-resistant, iPad-shaped sheets they make from trees. Also, social media is ass!

Steve's website looks nice and clean. It would be a nice challenge to create something similar-looking. So I thought. But first, I had to decide on what tech "stack" fitted my needs:

simple, minimal setup and looks
markdown writing
math typesetting
code highlighting
catppuccin colors with dark/light theme toggling

So, I landed on the no-dependency static site generator Zola, which is advertised as being written in Rust, fast, etc. But am I the only one that thinks that their website, ironically, looks like crap? Whatever. Then there is the Bear theme, which comes quite close to the aesthetics I'm going for.

Setup

Setting this up for local development was super easy:

Create a new Git repository for the project.
```
mkdir mysite/
cd mysite/
git init
```
Install Zola. (By defining a devshell in a Nix flake if you're cool. ;)
Initialize the Zola project.
```
zola init .
```

Add the theme via Git submodules. (No idea how these work, just go with it.)

git submodule add https://codeberg.org/alanpearce/zola-bearblog themes/zola-bearblog

Add theme = "zola-bearblog" and other important stuff to the zola.toml config file.
Content (in the form of markdown files) goes in the content/ directory. What a concept!

I'm too lazy to do a full tutorial here. Look into Zola's docs, the Bear theme, or my repo for details. I'll just highlight the things in my setup I thought were interesting:

Do math typesetting with KaTeX by creating templates/custom_head.html and adding the starter template with inline math to its <head>.
Add custom CSS by creating static/css/custom.css and including it with
```

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/custom.css">
```
That's how I got my preferred colors.
Get a dark/light theme switching button and avatar image by copying the relevant header file to your templates.
```
cp themes/zola-bearblog/templates/header.html templates/header.html
```
Then, this overwrites the header from the theme and one can add desired content:
```

<button id="theme-toggle" aria-label="Toggle dark/light mode">🌓</button>
```
Then, add the JavaScript for dark/light toggle into templates/custom_head.html. Yes. You heard right. What a cruel world we live in. Needing JavaScript to do a simple thing like a dark/light toggle button... (Maybe there even is a way of doing this with good ol' Adobe Flash Player?)

Okay. Now you've seen code highlighting. This is math: $$ \int_a^b f(x) \text{d}x= \frac{1}{3}(b^3 - a^3) $$ for $f: \Reals \to \Reals, f(x) = x^2, a \leq b$.