after fighting with zola for 1000 yrs, i finally made the switch to jekyll and was finally able to make a layout that fit my ultimate vision for the website!
this was heavily inspired by the 2-column websites of the 90's & 2000's, and came in four flavors: peach, moon, sakura, and honey!
(if you click on the emoji under the image, you can see a preview of each style!)
i finally dipped my toes into zola theming, to moderate success. this felt a little better, but I still really struggled to understand tera templating. it was extremely frustrating to get it even to here, and it was ultimately only kind of ok imo.
still a huge improvement over my initial theme tho, for my personal aesthetics (the theme itself is fine, I just wanted something more personalized). 
this was the initial version. for the first year i had this domain name, it redirected to my tumblr, and this began my foray into having my own website again.
it was built in zola and was lightning-fast, but I struggled with how to do templating, so this was short-lived. too minimalistic for me. 
