No, this blog still uses WordPress (now Hugo!) because of its convenvience and ease of use. But I needed a way to document my personal server that I use for Mumble, IRC and my small projects and I decided to test out static blog generators for that.

Normally people use Octopress (based on Jekyll) which labels itself as “A blogging framework for hackers” which is cool and all but I really don’t like Ruby and I had heard a lot of good stuff about Pelican so I went with that.

This post merely describes what’s different in my own approach and isn’t very detailed in itself, for a better tutorial in setting things up I recommend the documentation pages on how to get started.

Installing Pelican was a breeze, running sudo pip install pelican markdown installs both Pelican and the required packages to write in Markdown (normally you do this in a virtual environment but since I normally don’t work in Python this isn’t a concern for me). Following this up with pelican-quickstart generates a good basic template for getting started in the current directory.

I set up my blog in ~/Projects/Pelican and instead of using the make tools included with the quickstart package I set up my own alias in .bash_aliases like so echo "alias blog='pelican ~/Blog -o ~/Projects/Pelican/web -s ~/Projects/Pelican/pelicanconf.py'" >> ~/.bash_aliases. This allows me to write my blog posts in the “Blog” folder in my home directory and then just call blog to re-generate the blog when I’m done.

Of course this requires me to create a virtual host in Nginx that points to the output folder, but I prefer this over running a dedicated Python server since it allows for some better caching options as well as better performance and less resource hogging on the server.