Posts tagged with "Pelican"

Well, it didn't take as long as I expected it to. Just yesterday morning I was giving Pelican a look over as a possible engine for generating my blog, having wanted to move away from Jekyll for a while now. Having tried it and liked what I saw to start with, I wrote about how I liked it and wondered how long it would take me to make the switch.

By the evening I was making a proper effort to get the switchover started, and just a wee while earlier, before writing this post, the switch was made!

The process of making the switch was roughly this (and keep in mind I'm coming from using Jekyll):

1. Made a branch in the repo to work in.
2. Removed all of the Jekyll-oriented files.
3. Decided to set up Pelican and related tools in a virtual environment, managed using pipenv.
4. Ran pelican-quickstart to kick things off and give me a framework to start with.
5. Renamed the old _posts directory to content.
6. Kept tweaking the hell out of the Pelican config file until it started to look "just so" (this is a process that has been ongoing, and doubtless will keep happening for some time to come).
7. Tried out a few themes and settled on Flex; while not exactly what I wanted, it was close enough to help keep me motivated (while rolling my own theme from scratch would seem fun, I just know it would mean the work would never get done, or at least finished).
8. Did a mass tidy up of all the tags in all the posts; something I'd never really paid too much attention to as the Jekyll-based blog never actually allowed for following tags.
9. Went though all the posts and removed double quotes from a lot of the titles in the frontmatter (something Jekyll seems to have stripped, but which Pelican doesn't).
10. Tweaked the FILE_METADATA to ensure that the slugs for the URLs came from the filenames -- by default Pelican seems to slugify the title of a post and this meant that some of the URLs were changing.

All in all I probably spent 6 or 7 hours on making the move; a lot of that involving reading up on how to configure Pelican and researching themes. The rest of it was a lot of repetitive work to fix or tidy things.

The most important aspect of this was keeping the post URLs the same all the way back to the first post; as best as I can tell I've managed that.

So far I'm pleased with the result. I'm going to live with the look/theme for a wee while and see how it sits for me. I'm sure I'll tweak it a bit as time goes on, but at the moment I'm comfortable with how it looks.

Since getting my blog editing environment set up on the "new" machine a couple of days back I've been thinking some more about moving away from Jekyll. Jekyll itself has served me well since I started this blog back in 2015, but I was reminded again when installing it on the Mac Mini that it's Ruby-based and I have very little understanding of how to get a good Ruby experience on macOS¹.

Having mentioned on Mastodon that I was thinking about finally looking at moving my blog management/generation to something new, and specifically something Python-based and ideally some sort of site generator, I got a few suggestions.

One that looks promising so far is Pelican. At first glance it seems to tick a few boxes for me:

• Python-based (so easy for me to grok in terms of installing, and also more chance of being hackable).
• Uses Markdown (curiously as an alternative, to reStructuredText, which looks to be the default).
• Does article-based stuff as well as page-based stuff.
• Lots of themes, and themes are Jinja2-based (I'm pretty familiar with Jinja thanks to my Django days and also using the library when kicking off ng2web).
• RSS feed generation.
• Syntax-highlighted code blocks.

While I'm not quite ready to dive in and make the move just yet (I am on a "muck about at home" holiday this week, but I've got enough planned without losing a day to rebooting my blog), I did do a quick experiment to see if Pelican would work for me.

Key to this is can I keep the URLs for all the posts the same? If I can't that's a non-starter.

Things got off to a good start with an easy install:

$ pipx install "pelican[markdown]"

I then used the pelican-quickstart to kick off a test site, copied in my existing Markdown files, dived into the docs and found how to configure the generated URLs and... yeah, within like 10 minutes I had a very rough version of my blog up and going.

It looked like garbage, the theme really wasn't to my taste at all, but the core of the blog was working.

I've nuked it all for now but a more considered evaluation is now on my TODO list. Things I'll need to drive into properly are:

• Find a base theme that's to my taste.
• Get Disqus working with it so that any old comments remain in place.
• Get my image/attachment layout back in place.
• Go through and tidy up all the tagging (which has been a mess with this blog because I never did get round to getting Jekyll to actually use tags).
• Figure out the best way to do the publishing to GitHub pages.
• Likely a bunch of other stuff I've not thought about yet.

But, yeah, for a brief "over first coffee of the day" tinker to see if I like it... I like!

Let's see how long it takes me to actually get around to making the switch. ;-)