Since last fall, I have been working on a project to visit, photograph, and document each of the 146 state parks in my home state of Washington in the U.S. Normally this site will be devoted to my life as a developer, but today I will incorporate the outdoor-explorer and photographer parts of my life. This is an article about how I built the blog for the 146 Parks project.

Here is a screen shot from the current home page:

Initial Launch: Squarespace

I first launched the site using Squarespace last fall.

Here is an equivalent screen shot from the old version of the site:

The good news about launching on Squarespace: I was able to test the concept, build a prototype design, and share some of the initial posts very quickly.

But there were some definite downsides as well:

• I wound up spending a lot of time expressing the same concepts over and over. For example, the maps that I include needed to be rebuilt for each page and I needed to remember to apply the same settings each time.
• I rather quickly hit the limits of what I could build with their template system. Again, regarding the maps on each page, I could only put a single marker on each individual page.
• Perhaps most seriously, I repeatedly experienced data loss while composing my content. Squarespace’s interface often involves going several layers deep in modal dialogs. When I found myself in the wrong dialog, my instinct was to hit the Escape key a time or three to get out of that modal world. The problem is that the Escape key also exits the editing experience. So if I miscalculated on how many times to hit Escape, I lost my work-in-progress content. This happened several times.

The Goals

I wanted to be able to build the site while off-line. Back in the Before Times, I would often work on my sites from places with very limited internet access. A B&B in Ireland a few years ago sticks out as a particularly painful authoring experience on Squarespace. Ironically, as I write the first draft of this article I am on a plane with mediocre Internet access.

I wanted deep control over the site design. And yet, I didn’t want to have to build the whole thing from scratch.

Being a good software developer, I like doing things efficiently. And I like writing text using a code editor.

Previous Experience

It turns out I’ve been down this road before. Long-time readers of mine might remember that I rebuilt my primary site in 2018 using a static site generator, which let me build that site using a combination of HTML templates and Markdown.

That part felt right to me, but the SSG that I use there, Jekyll, felt heavyweight to me (lots of work to get the right version of Ruby installed, etc.), so I decided to look for something easier to use and maintain.

I Got Zola

I’ve been doing most of my professional work in the Rust language lately, so I was very happy to learn that there are a few good Rust-based static site generators.

I settled on Zola. Zola’s own site does a good job of describing its benefits, but I feel the need to call out one more: the templating system rocks. What I especially like is that it offers a mechanism for reuse and customization. This played out in a way that was a pleasant surprise for me.

Although the Zola project no longer directly links to it, I also found the Bulma CSS framework very valuable.

So I first rebuilt 146 Parks using Zola and Bulma. The new version of the site launched a few weeks ago and I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out.

I then had the idea to start rebuilding the rest of my web presence. That project is ongoing, but you’re reading one part of that project now.

I refactored my 146 Parks theme into a shared theme with some common elements that I am now using for other sites.

The sites may not look much alike, but this site, my new travel blog, and 146 Parks are all built on the same shared theme with relatively little custom template code for each.

Have a Look Around

I’m open-sourcing the repos behind each site and the shared theme here:

• 146 Parks: GitHub
• ericscouten.dev: GitHub (this site)
• ericscouten.travel: GitHub (an up-and-coming blog about my non-state-park travels)
• zola-es-theme: (the shared theme behind all of these sites)

These are all provided as-is and as what I will call “inspire-ware.” I don’t wish to enable outright clones of my look and feel, and for that reason I’m not applying a traditional open-source license to them. If you find a snippet that helps you, feel free to adapt it for your purpose. But, please, make your site yours.

Hope this tour of Zola was helpful!