+++
title = "Personal Site"
description = "Moving from an abandoned React website which hasn't been updated in over 4 years to Zola."
date = 2026-01-17
updated = 2026-04-20

[taxonomies]
tags = ["web", "zola"]
category = ["project"]
+++

I finally had the motivation (and time) to update my personal site. It's one of those tasks which aren't very interesting which makes starting it 100 times harder than it needs to be. 
The website was originally written in React (as I really didn't know better) but it was wildly overcomplicated for my needs. 

At some point after I wrote my original website I had heard of static site generators. In particular a friend had told me how they used Zola to set up her personal site [ivytime.gay](https://ivytime.gay)  

I wanted to move to an easier solution, one that allowed the bulk of content to be easily generated, and one that I could easily style. The obvious choice here was to use a static site generator.

After I decided that I browsed the Zola docs and [ivytime.gay](https://ivytime.gay)'s source to get a better feel for how I wanted to go about making my site. 

---
## Style

I borrowed *heavily* from the style and theming used in [without.boats](https://without.boats/) 

I also took inspiration from [mcyoung.xyc](https://mcyoung.xyz) 

> also please do check these blogs out if you haven't seen them already, they have wonderful articles on many interesting programming topics

---
All in all getting a nice looking website with Zola went pretty smoothly, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Take a look at the [source](https://github.com/ParkerTenBroeck/ParkerTenBroeck.github.io) if you so desire