Pelican up and running

David Wagner

I decided to start blogging again. I wanted to move away from Blogspot and write posts using some markup in vi and publish them as static HTML. I looked into many static blog generators and I ended up choosing Pelican.

The steps in the documentation worked fine, I had my blog running in about 2 mins. I decided to separate the site generation in two different repositories

  1. https://github.com/wagdav/thewagner.net contains the posts in RST files and the neccessary config files for Pelican.
  2. https://github.com/wagdav/wagdav.github.com contains the actual HTML source and receieves only automatic updates from the first repository. This is set up to generate a User Github Page.

On my laptop I have the clone of these two repositories as:

~/blog/thewagner.net/
~/blog/wagdav.github.com/

I configured Pelican to place its output in ../wagdav.github.com. I needed to make a small adjustment in the generated Makefile, to prevent the make clean command destroying the git repository in the output directory and deleting the files needed for Github Pages. So now the clean target is:

clean:
    @find $(OUTPUTDIR) -mindepth 1 -not -iwholename '*/.git*' \
                                   -not -name 'README.md' \
                                   -not -name 'CNAME' \

which does the job just fine.

The next steps are to import posts from my old blog and change the default style. I want to have something that uses Twitter Bootstrap.