Starting with Pelican

In about 1998, I was building a website for a friend. The site was entirely static. I’d already learned the hard way about the pain of trying to keep lots of separate static HTML files visually consistent.

To build the site, I used a system (whose name has since faded from memory) which took as its input some template files, some files containing the content, and combined them together to build a website. I’d run a script, and FTP the resulting HTML to a server somewhere.

Since then, I’ve tried various different things. I used Greymatter for a while, and then mostly wrote my own - first in PHP, and then more recently in Django. The only thing that all these blogs had in common was this: I spent more time building the system than I ever spent using it.

Today

14 years after my first static site generator experience, I’m back. This time I’m using Pelican, and hoping that the auto-reload stuff will make writing easier - as I can write in Markdown, and see the results as they will be rendered live¹.

Thanks to pydanny for the tip about Pelican - it’s been pretty straightforward so far.

Customising Pelican

The only changes I’ve really made to Pelican are to the CSS (fixing up the code style, because I don’t much like the default monospace font, and modifying the footnote link style). I did that by just copying the default theme into my directory (which I’ve called plagiarism), and modifying my call to re-compile my blog to:

pelican src -s pelican.conf.py -t plagiarism

Deploying Pelican

I use WebFaction for all my sites, and whilst deploying was easy, it wasn’t entirely obvious that I did it the right way. WebFaction has a really nice model for managing sites (domains, applications, and websites), but Pelican didn’t really fit into its model. Eventually I settled on creating a Pelican installation in my root directory, and then used “Symbolic link to static only app” with the path set to Pelican’s output directory.

I’ve added a cron job to my WebFaction account which just pulls from my public GitHub repository, so any changes I push to GitHub get deployed to the site without any intervention.