Blog technology

October 21, 2012 - 3 min read
Old and probably not relevant

Kept here for historical reasons.. I don't use much of the content here anymore.

Looks like Pelican is still around tho (2021), but as said, not using it anymore..

After going back and forth to what technology I wanted behind my blog I decided on;

Pelican as the static blog generator

Pelican is written in python, is very extendible with plugins and easy to create themes. It is also easy to configure and use. The main reason I went with pelican is its simplicity, and possibility to customize.

There is already other blogs out there that explains pelican advantages and disadvantages and other blogs that have info about using github pages and pelican, so that is not something I will spend time on here. But if you like to blog using plain-text, python, html/js/css customization and a power full generator to put it into a blog, pelican might be something to check out.

Multimarkdown as the writing "format"

Multimarkdown is an extension to markdown. Markdown is a structured way of writing articles, snippets, mail or even whole books. It was created as a way to write plaintext which can later be converted to html/pdf/odt/LaTeX or whatever you want, keeping the structure you want.

To be honest, everyone who sends mail on a daily bases should at least look into this. Or at least thing about it. Getting mails that contains a lot of text, and no structure is painful to read.

When it comes to Markdown vs. reStructuredText, I ended up with markdown because it feels much bigger than rst. Even tough rst is something which the python community uses a lot, it just feels a little dead. I have even tried to use rst for a long time, but it is missing some love from other people.

Github pages for hosting the generated html files

I love using Github for my opensourced projects, so it felt very natural to use their pages to store the html files for my blog. It is free, easy to publish to, and stable. I don't really have much more to say on this. But if my blog was not going to be a bunch of static files, I would probably have used Heroku.