Reviving the dev blog with Pelican

Hello World (Again)!

I am reviving my dev blog using Pelican - a python based static site generator!

Here is a brief history of my blogging

V1 - Plain old HTML

In the early days, I had a 'blog' that was done using static HTML (hand-coded!)

V2 - Wordpress

Then I used wordpress.
While WP was feature rich, it was just too much for what I needed.

V3 - Static Site Generated from Markdown

Now, I like the simplicity of just writing markdown and having a static site generator generate the site from markdown files.

Jekyll

I have first tried to run with Jekyll, but ran into so many issues

• Installing Jekyll on Ubuntu 24.04 wasn't easy - some dependancy issue.
• Then I tried running a Jekyll docker, even it had errors on a brand new site!

I didn't want to spend too much time troubleshooting. So looked for an alternative, preferrably Python based.

And I found pelican

Pelican

I liked Pelican right away.

• It is python based and I know Python better than Ruby (Jekyll's language)
• I can create a python virtual environment for pelican, and install all the dependencies within the environment. So they are confined in that environment and do not mess up any other enviroments.
• It was simple to get up and running. I just pip install pelican and used pelican-quickstart to create a basic site -- all within minutes.
• I like the idea of previewing the site locally before publishing
• I was able to choose from numerous themes. I ended up choosing Flex (github | preview )
• I even ended up customizing flex for my needs - it was easy enough.

Back to Basics!

It has been working out well so far.
Looking forward to just blogging.