Welcome to Zonest!

Zonest is a drag and drop static site generator for making Zonelets-style blogs! Based on Zoner by Ryan Trawick.

Why?

I wanted to start writing my own blog, but, like Ryan Trawick (creator of Zoner), I couldn't figure out how to use other static site generators like Jekyll or 11ty. I found Zonelets and it seemed like the perfect choice, but I really didn't feel like messing with html or js files in my off-time just to write a blogpost. So I looked up some simpler static site generators, and came across Zoner! But... turns out the author abandoned it a year ago and it didn't work on Linux... So I forked it and updated it! It still has the basic Zoner charm of being a little console application to generate Zonelet blogs from Markdown files, but now better! And less intimidating for people who have never touched a static site generator in their lives!

This allows you to keep your source separate from your built site, in case you want source control for versioning of your writing. It also allows for a true static website, so older browsers without JavaScript and people with slow internet can still read it at blazing fast speeds.

But, like Zoner, this tool mainly exists for making your Zonelet more maintainable, writing blog posts quicker and easier, and keeping the site style consistent across pages.

How?

On Windows:

Just drag and drop your Zone folder into it!

On MacOS:

Like Windows, you can also just drag and drop your Zone folder into it!

On Linux:

On Linux, you can run ./zonest path/to/your/zone

Features

A super simple workflow for making beautiful blogs.
HTML optimized for screen readers.
Automatic RSS feed generation.
Disqus comment support.
Backwards compatability with existing Zonelets and Zoner pages.
Open source, MIT, easy to extend or chain into existing workflows.

Plus: These are new Zonest features! (Not in Zoner)

Customizable output folder and updated help commands!
Better interface and user experience in the command line.
Now supports .ico and .svg favicon files! (Zoner had a bug that made it ignore .ico favicons)

Fixes

These are things that were unintended behavior in Zoner, that are now mostly fixed in Zonest.

The Linux version of Zonest is now compiled using .NET 6.0, which should work on modern Linux distros (Zoner required an outdated version of libssl)
If your favicon was .ico, Zoner would forget to update the head to the correct filetype. This is fixed in Zonest.

Where can I get it?

You can download it from itch.io!