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:
- Pelican documentation (which is great)
- Creating A Pelican-Powered Site on GitHub Pages
- Pelican Guide - Moving From WordPress and Initial Setup
- Yes, this blog is now powered by 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.
