Real-time systems and AI-first products, shipped end to end. Zola 2026-08-26T00:00:00+00:00 https://sanchay.sh/blog/atom.xml 2026-08-26T00:00:00+00:00 2026-08-26T00:00:00+00:00 Sanchay Pahalwani https://sanchay.sh/blog/how-this-site-is-built/ <p>The homepage of this site is a single hand-written HTML file. No framework, inline CSS, a few dozen lines of vanilla JS. I wanted to keep it that way and still have a place to write, so the blog is built by <a rel="external" href="https://www.getzola.org/">Zola</a>, a static site generator that ships as one binary.</p> <h2 id="the-rules">The rules</h2> <ul> <li>The deploy output is a closed allowlist. If the build produces a file the script does not expect, the deploy fails.</li> <li>The homepage never passes through a build tool. The build script copies it into the output directory after Zola runs, byte for byte.</li> <li>Syntax highlighting happens at build time.</li> </ul> <h2 id="the-build">The build</h2> <p>The whole pipeline is a short shell script:</p> <pre class="giallo z-code"><code data-lang="shellscript"><span class="giallo-l"><span class="z-entity z-name">rm</span><span class="z-constant"> -rf</span><span class="z-string"> dist</span></span> <span class="giallo-l"><span class="z-entity z-name">zola</span><span class="z-constant"> --root</span><span class="z-string"> site build</span><span class="z-constant"> --output-dir</span><span class="z-punctuation z-definition z-string"> &quot;</span><span class="z-variable z-other">$PWD</span><span class="z-string z-punctuation z-definition z-string">/dist&quot;</span></span> <span class="giallo-l"><span class="z-entity z-name">cp</span><span class="z-string"> index.html 404.html dist/</span></span> <span class="giallo-l"><span class="z-entity z-name">cp</span><span class="z-constant"> -R</span><span class="z-string"> assets dist/assets</span></span></code></pre> <p>Posts are markdown files with TOML front matter. A post is a draft until the <code>draft = true</code> line is deleted, and drafts never reach production builds. The feed lives at <a href="/blog/atom.xml">/blog/atom.xml</a>.</p>