ankursinha.in/blog

neuroscience/fedora/musings

Mon 02 March 2015

[How to] set up your Pelican based static blog

Posted by ankur in Tech (372 words, approximately a 2 minute read)

  • Share this post:

In my last post, I mentioned that I had moved to a Pelican based blog. In this post, I'll document how I did this, for myself as a future reference and for others that might be looking for a resource. Yet another howto.

Requirements

  • I'm using a Fedora system, but you can use another Linux (or not) distribution too. Pelican is written in Python, so it should be easily usable on any system that has Python on it. This guide will limit itself to Fedora.

  • Pelican is available in the Fedora repositories:

    sudo yum install python-pelican

  • Git and a Github account

  • Your favourite text editor

  • Your hosting space - of course

Steps

  • Create a new repository on github and clone it. This will hold the source files for your posts.

  • To create a skeleton file, you can use the pelican-quickstart command.

  • This sets up your directory structure, like this:

    $ tree -L 1
.
├── content
├── develop_server.sh
├── fabfile.py
├── Makefile
├── output
├── pelicanconf.py
├── pelican-plugins
├── publishconf.py
├── README.md
└── voidy-bootstrap

The content directory will contain the source files. You can either use rst or markdown to write them. The output directory will contain the files pelican generates. The readme file is one that you'll set up, just for your github repo. voidy-boostrap is a theme I'm using and pelican-plugins is the plugins repository. More on these later.

  • All you need to do is write a hello world post. Something like this:

    Hello World
###########

:date: 2015-03-02 10:39
:tags: Pelican, Wordpress
:category: Tech
:slug: hello-world
:author: ankur
:lang: en

Hello World!

  • To compile this, you run make html and then make serve to take a look at your post (Direct your browser to localhost:8000). By default, it'll look quite simple. You can use pelican-themes to change how your stuff looks. They also have a set of plugins you can use.

Importing from Wordpress

  • Pelican provides a tool that lets you import your wordpress blog into it: pelican-import. It's far from perfect, though, so you're probably going to need to work on your posts before you publish. sed is quite useful.
  • Share this post:

Comments