SO using Zonelets didn't work out for me. It's definitely a cool project, and I'm glad it exists. But, I'm at a level where I think I can accomplish what Zonelets is doing on my own, writing my own code, and learn more in the process. So I've reverted my site back to my hand coded HTML.
Of course, writing things purely by hand is pretty painful, especially if you're going to do it in native HTML/CSS/JS. Which so far I am. I discovered jQuery today, which I can see being very useful. I used it to dynamically insert my navbar (also I made a navbar btw). So this way I can have a single DRY navbar definition that is the same on every page, that I canupdate in a central location. Great! However now I'm running into the issue that it just looks bad to have the navbar inserted by javascript at page load time. I'm assuming this is why server side rendering or static side rendering is helpful - either you generate the page server-side prior to serving it to the client, or you pre-render the page so that it's statically available to the end user.
I really like having these realizations, wrestling with a method or technology until you hit a limitation. Once you understand the limitation, then it makes sense to move to a tool designed to solve that problem. But jumping to a solution before you understand its purpose limits your learning. So, I think at this point I'm getting a feel for the limitations of hand coding websites. I'm using Neocities, so obviously doing any server side JS develoment is out of the question (and I don't want to do that anyway, too much work for a personal project). So going with a static site generator seems like the way to go.
There are many of these available. I want to see if there is one that fits the spirit of neocities and the personal web revival as opposed to a more corporate or professional vibe, but if there isn't one that's OK. I have used Pelican once in a past experiment but I don't want to bring Python into this right now. I'll find something a bit simpler.
some time passes
I just did a turotial with Eleventy, a SSG. I think I'm going to use this one. It seems to use jinja templating and is node based which are tools I'm familiar with. It seems to make doing what I'm trying to much easier. It's similar to Zonelets but more powreful and flexible. I think this will be a good fit! And I can use what I've learned so far as a foundation to move further. Also, writing posts in Markdown instead of raw HTML is going to be nice lol.