Why Pelican

I finally replaced the old Wordpress [1]-based website with one based on Pelican [2]. Pelican is a static site generator which is appealing to me for the following reasons:

• Content creation can be done from the comfort of vim
• CLI goodness for deployment
• git goodness for easy backup, content management, and writing on-the-go
• super-easy to host, allowing me to drop php and mysql support on my server.

… which is basically what is listed on the Pelican website. Good work.

First few reasons just make me happy, which is especially important if I’m going to succeed at actually posting periodically.

The last reason is technical, but important because the server running this site is on its last legs (and was reject hardware years ago). As an added bonus I no longer have to worry about a wordpress vulnerability giving my site to some hacker. Being able to trivially deploy to an alternate host should my server go down is also a nice comfort.

Finally, Pelican is used for kernel.org [3]. Good enough for them, good enough for me.

External

For the curious, here’s the components used to build this website:

Git repository: github [4]

Pelican theme used: bootstraped [5]

Bootstrap coloring: Cyborg [6]

Lessons

• Never underestimate how much time can be lost redesigning a website.
• Nothing makes you go “didn’t need those files anyway” like a runaway script
• Pelican [2] is awesome
• I believe I now understand the appeal of formats like rst [7]: More writing, less formatting.
• Writing (even this post!) is remarkably hard. Practice makes perfect.

References