I recently switched from Blogger to this new blog (JeffComputes). Blogger is competent and feature-rich however I wanted a bit more control over my blogging platform. The blog is now powered by Pelican, a great static website generator written in Python. The theme is a customized version of fresh by Jui-Shan Liang. The hosting is provided by RamNode and their great VPS lineup. The workflow for writing a post looks like this:
- All of the blog content is maintained in a Fossil repository (I prefer Fossil over Git for smaller projects) in my Dropbox folder; the customized theme is also maintained on GitHub (Git and Fossil play well together).
- New posts are typically written in Markdown but could instead be written in ReStructuredText or AsciiDoc if more expressive markup is needed.
- A series of scripts are used to generate and test the website locally.
- Once the new post is reviewed via the local test server, a script handles uploading the content to the VPS.
That's it! It's a pretty straightforward process once everything has been set up. The only minor gripe with Pelican is that it's category based. I wanted to keep all the blog posts together in a single category and use tags to organize them. This is doable with Pelican but does require a bit of modification (hence the custom theme).
