Northern Steppes

Overview

The site is generated via Zola, a static-site-generator. All the content here gets converted into HTML/CSS/JS when a change is made, and is hosted on Github Pages.

Website Content

Everything in the content/ directory is responsible for creating the content on the website. Pages can either be Markdown files (e.g. content/bylaws.md) or a folder with a index.md file inside (e.g. content/proficiencies/). Zola requires that all Markdown files have a header that's surrounded with +++ - check out the files for examples.

Local Development

The site is built with Zola. Use Zola 0.22.1 — this must match the version pinned in .github/workflows/publish.yaml.

Do not install "the latest" Zola. 0.23 is a breaking release (Tera v2; macros, imports and shortcodes were all removed) and cannot build this site — it fails on the first {% import %} in templates/index.html. Migrating the templates to 0.23 is planned but not yet done.

Install Zola 0.22.1

Windows (note winget install getzola.zola gives you 0.23.x, which will not work):

$dest = "$env:USERPROFILE\tools\zola-0.22.1"
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path $dest | Out-Null
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://github.com/getzola/zola/releases/download/v0.22.1/zola-v0.22.1-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip" -OutFile "$dest\zola.zip"
Expand-Archive -Force "$dest\zola.zip" -DestinationPath $dest

Then either add %USERPROFILE%\tools\zola-0.22.1 to your PATH, or call ~\tools\zola-0.22.1\zola.exe directly.

macOS / Linux — download the matching archive from the v0.22.1 release and put zola on your PATH.

Verify with zola --version — it must print zola 0.22.1.

Build and preview

zola serve

Serves a live-reloading preview at http://127.0.0.1:1111; edits to content/, templates/ and sass/ refresh the browser automatically.

zola build

One-off build into public/. A clean build reports Creating 48 pages (3 orphan) and 4 sections; any ERROR output means the site would fail to deploy.

Both commands also write a resized-image cache into static/processed_images/. That directory is generated — it is ignored by git and you can safely delete it.

VS Code users: Terminal → Run Task has Zola: serve and Zola: build preconfigured, and the recommended karunamurti.tera extension adds template syntax highlighting.