Making the switch to Pelican

Sun 12 May 2013

Welcome to the new and improved carsonfarmer.com! If you are reading this, then you are enjoying my new, responsive static website/blog. The new site is powered by Pelican — a static website generator written in Python — and is hosted on GitHub using GitHub Pages. Most of the content on the site is written in Markdown, which makes it really easy to add headings, anchors, and all sorts of goodies to simplify writing blog posts and web-pages.

The move from WordPress to Pelican was relatively painless, though there were some issues with comments and converting (some) existing posts to Markdown. I also took the opportunity to update the site, change the page structure a bit and try out a few things like adding icons (FontAwesome), using Twitter Bootstrap for some of the UI, and some other tweaks. To get me through the process, I took advantage of several blogs and sites dedicated to documenting the switch to Pelican:

Once I get things working, I’ll also start to think about some of the points here, to make things even more responsive and readable.

One of the things that I did have trouble with was getting my RSS feeds set up like it was in my WordPress site: /?feed=rss2. For now, I’m just rerouting things to /feeds/all.rss.xml, but search engines won’t recognize this, and I’m sure there is a better solution out there… any thoughts? I am still missing some things that WordPress did quite nicely, including comments (I’m now relying on Disqus for comments), site search (I’ve started using Tapir for this, and have implemented a cool search tool that I may turn into a Pelican plug-in if I find some time), and the plethora of plug-ins and themes available for WordPress sites. Having said that, it is relatively easy to create new themes, and adding social networking components like a Twitter feed using standard html is pretty simple.

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