my site sccl.cc was originally on astro (actually ORIGINALLY, it was just on nodejs, back in the distant covid days)

astro is a cool thing - not bad for quickly knocking together something pretty, but over time i kinda stopped liking it, feels heavy and stuff.

i came across zine - an ssg in zig. - you can build a site with just one binary without any dependencies.

templates are in superhtml - that’s valid html with templating added through attributes like :text, :if, :loop.

Content is in supermd - like .md, but supposedly cooler.

# the moving process

overall moving is pretty simple - gotta rewrite layouts from astro to superhtml, move over the existing scripts. the most tedious part is that astro uses its own fucking .astro files with their weird mix of js and html - had to change the approach a bit.

upd: the approach changed a few more times later, with the arrival of my own crutches :sob:

# deploy

zine is compiled into a statically linked standalone binary.

you can build through npm in ci, as the wiki recommends - using kristoff-it/setup-zine@v1:

like this:

- uses: kristoff-it/setup-zine@v1
  with:
    version: v0.11.3
- run: zine release

my site used to be on cf - pushed with wrangler like this:

- uses: cloudflare/wrangler-action@v3
  with:
    apiToken: ${{ secrets.CLOUDFLARE_API_TOKEN }}
    accountId: ${{ secrets.CLOUDFLARE_ACCOUNT_ID }}
    command: pages deploy public/ -project-name sccl-cc

now fully self-hosted it’s a bit simpler

? goodies

the coolest thing about zine is that its build is mega-fast, it generally doesn’t accumulate a hundred dependencies like js frameworks do, with a giant node_modules and so on..

quite a lot of control, which some frameworks piss away with their abstraction levels - for my page weight minimalism that’s a critical plus.

? downsides

zine is beta :partying_face: (v0.11.0 at the time of writing)

honestly i don’t see any real downsides yet - just caveats from the fact that it’s not some framework or whatever, but a static site generator meant for making microblogs and such, though i’m trying to bolt on js and apis too - and i seem to like it all, everything works, but in places i have to hack together some custom stuff, cuz it’s not zine-native, and i need it.