Back when I started this blog, I simply wanted an outlet to prove that I could get to grips with the type of work I'd be doing in the IT sector. Being in my last year at University, the idea was that an online presence would help land me a job.

Three years on, it hasn't. This technique might, in another time, have worked among the global corporations or start-ups of Silicon Valley or London, but the job market here and now is different - and demands worked experience above almost all else.

It has, however, served as an outlet to discuss a variety of topics from messaging apps to propaganda and bridges. But while my writing has advanced in this time, the look of the blog it appeared on had not. After seeing some inspiration, I decided it was time to change that.…

The Open Graph Protocol, or OGP, is a series of <meta> tags designed to provide metadata about content hosted online, including articles, photos, and videos. It's created by Facebook, which would normally be a big red flag for me - but since it's an open standard, other sites have embraced it too, including Microsoft's LinkedIn and the decentralised Mastodon.

Platforms use OGP data to display rich information alongside webpages their users link to, including photos, bespoke headlines that differ from the page's actual title, and descriptions to elaborate on both of them.

AI is big business, and it's largely fuelled by the vast troves of data on the Internet. Much of it was published in an era when harvesting authors' work to train models that may eventually supercede them, if not unimaginable, certainly seemed like a distant future. That future has now arrived.

Recently, I came across a proposal by the independent search company Mojeek for new ways for website owners to control how AI companies crawl data to train their models with. It's not of much use to me - all my posts are available on GitHub, free of any restrictions I place on them here - but I was intrigued to explore how I could implement it given I don't write any of the HTML for this site myself.

Zola is a Static Site Generator (SSG) that converts text you write in Markdown documents into a website that can be served on the Internet. Being a static site, it's simple and doesn't require a database behind it to serve files from - and, in using Markdown, text is formatted in the same way as note-taking apps such as Notion and Obsidian, meaning you don't need to learn HTML syntax to start writing.

In theory that's simple, but figuring out how to make Zola build a nice-looking, themed site from those Markdown files takes a little more understanding. You might also want to use Git to track the changes you make, and publish the site automatically using a platform like GitHub or Cloudflare Pages.

In this post I'll share how I made this blog, from installing Zola, to adding a theme, and building a site you can see in your browser - as well as learning the basics of Git in the process.