Publishing with Pelican

I haven't done serious web development work in quite some time. There are reasons for that.

Mostly because I have been busy being a sys admin instead...

A reason for now doing this kind of work for myself again, is my departure from a lot of social media websites like Facebook (no, no link here).

The reasons for that are quite obvious, apart from the general evilness of large companies, agencies and governments alike (especially when looking at the developments in European and US-American politics in the past few months, or rather years).

After some changes in my hosting plans (moving away from Hosteurope to NetworkSEC, but more on that soon), this also involved dividing private content from that of the association (Freakquenzy Records) I am working with.

Ultimately this led me to the decision to find a publishing tool that was not depending on a database setup (like Wordpress is), but rather something text file based (also because I am a daily Vim user).

Say hello to Pelican, a Python based static website generator!

With Pelican one can write content in Markdown or ReStructuredText and have simple themes) and the site generator take care of the rest. Pretty awesome! A separate Makefile (besides the easy possibility of local testing) makes it possible to push a new website version directly to the webserver or other destinations.

Currently I've started work on some static pages and my own theme, cloned from the notmyidea cms theme. Now my whole website can be conveniently developed in my own git repository.

Although for newbie users a login backend for administering a website (like the one Wordpress offers) is a very easy solution, it also introduces security issues (bad passwords, hacked computers & malware, PHP bugs, bad content, bad plugins, etc.).

I'm glad I've found a very lightweight and fast solution in Pelican, that works well with nginx.