This site is part of a bigger shift I’ve been making—away from bloat, noise,and platforms that try to do too much.

I’m carving out a slower, simpler digital space for myself.

I started, like many do, looking at WordPress—but it didn’t take long to rule it out. Too heavy, too bloated, too plugin-hungry.

I gave Ghost a spin next. Even set up a running instance. It’s modern, open source, and sleek, but still felt like more than I needed.

That’s when I stumbled into the world of static site generators. Specifically, via the impressive 512kb.club —a small, nerdy collective of websites under 512 kilobytes, advocating for a simpler, leaner web. It felt like stepping into a time machine, and, it felt great.

Clean CSS, minimal markup, and a whole load of retro charm.

Why Zola?

I came across a few generators: Hugo, Eleventy, and Zola.

  • Hugo is written in Go garners a lot of praise, As does Eleventy, written in Node.js.
  • I didn’t spend too long with either— but Zola just clicked.
  • It’s written in Rust, but more importantly, it was simpler to grasp.
  • The structure made sense instantly.
  • And I was drawn to the clean Anemone theme which I now use.

High-Level Setup Steps

For those curious or wanting to try something similar, here’s how I got started:

  1. Pick a domain – I went with INWX as my registrar (clean, privacy-respecting, EU-based).
  2. Install Zola locally – I used Linux WSL on Windows.
wget https://github.com/getzola/zola/releases/download/v0.20.0/zola-v0.20.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
tar -xvzf zola-v0.20.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
sudo mv zola /usr/local/bin/

  1. Create your content in Markdown. I use VS Code for now (though exploring other options).

  2. Use zola serve to preview your site locally.

  3. Set your base_url in config.toml:

    One small hiccup to watch for: if you’re hosting your site behind a domain like https://example.com, make sure to set base_url to match. Otherwise, internal links might break when you deploy.

  4. Deploy it with a simple web server.

    I use Caddy—a lightweight, modern web server that handles HTTPS automatically and serves my static files from /var/www/mangotek.

    • Set up A records via your registrar (INWX worked well for me)
    • Point your domain to your server IP
    • Caddy handles the HTTPS certificates with no hassle

Bonus: Green Hosting

One big motivation for this shift is also sustainability. I’m currently hosting the site with a local EU-based provider committed to green energy. They’ve cleverly placed their servers inside regular buildings where the residual heat gets reused to warm water. It’s a brilliant idea—and one more reason to rethink how and where we host things.

I’ll share more about this setup once my personal cloud space POC is ready to spotlight. But safe to say, I’m excited about the direction this is heading.

More soon.