Site migrated to Pelican

Up till now, I was using Wordpress for this site. Over the past few months, I got fed up with all the Wordpress and plugin updates (I get an email from Plesk stating that there are updates). Nowadays, it looks like you can’t run with current versions for more than a week. This made me look into an alternative that I already use for another site of mine: Pelican. Pelican is a static site generator, powered by Python.

Pelican can convert posts (articles) or pages in Markdown or RST to HTML by compiling all the content. The result is a site that doesn’t depend on a database. It is ideal for small, static sites like blogs. Because of my last $workplace, I can easily manage the technical aspects of using Pelican.

For the interested few: I’m using a Python virtual environment on my laptop that has the right Python modules installed. The site content, Pelican and the Pelicanyan theme are stored (not hosted) together on GitLab.com. All changes are committed and pushed to this repository. The project on GitLab has a CI/CD pipeline that checks the layout of all the Markdown files that I write, pointing out errors if there are any. I’m using pymarkdownlnt for this. After the output is generated, I can sync the static site to my webhost.

The tasks in the CI/CD pipeline are performed by Docker GitLab runners, hosted on my own hardware. I still have to automate the upload to my webhost though 🙂