Zonelets Legacy
Zonelets was initially created and released in November of 2020. Since then, various people have created projects related to or partly inspired by Zonelets! Many of these projects involve static site generation (SSG), which is a workflow with many great benefits. Static site generators regenerate the pages of your site when you make changes, meaning that you can make changes across your whole site, for example in the header, without the header being generated live by JavaScript as it is in Zonelets. This makes your blog more lightweight to load and less error prone. There are additional benefits, such as the ability to write blog posts in Markdown (quicker and more human-readable than HTML) or generate RSS (RSS feeds/readers are a great way to keep up with your favorite blogs without being locked into any particular social media site).
Zonelets I think serves a nice niche in terms of getting familiar with the basic building blocks of the web. However, if you are already familiar with HTML/CSS/Javascript, or simply want more convenience, then static site generation is a fantastic path to go down for your personal blog!
Full blog tools/templates (Zonelets alternatives)
- Strawberry Starter is a blog template by Kate Bagenzo, who says 'Part of my design goal for Strawberry Starter was basically "Zonelets but without needing to write HTML".' Strawberry Starter uses the static site generator 11ty.
- Bimbo by izzy kestrel was created "for her personal use, but maybe it could be of value to others as well." I believe it is a made-from-scratch static site generator. She also provides info on creating a Bluesky-powered comments section!
- Zoner by Ryan Trawick is a "drag and drop static site generator for making Zonelets-style blogs!" It has many cool features including backwards compatability with existing Zonelets.
Tools that extend Zonelets
- zoneRSS by Adam Ledoux is "a Zonelets compatible RSS tool".
- Zonerender by Ivory and Jade is an interesting tool that can generate RSS from your Zonelets archive.
Please note that these projects are not formally affiliated with Zonelets, and I can't speak directly to their contents. But I encourage you to check them out, particularly if you appreciate the spirit of Zonelets but miss the lack of certain features or conveniences. It makes me really happy to see people creating and sharing systems that meet their particular needs and desires!
To submit your own work, please contact: zonelets.blogs@gmail.com
~Marina