Hello World

The part where I welcome you to version X.Y of my blog.

Where “X” and “Y” are numbers larger than I would like to admit.

Let’s just call it iteration number ten. I’ve built this blog on the Pelican Framework, with a large dose of help from Justin Phelp’s two guides to blog automation with Pelican.

Why Pelican?

I wanted to build a simple, static site that I can post directly as HTML - either through my own server, or on a Rackspace Cloud Files Container. (That’s where we are now.) I also wanted to keep the actual authoring component in-line with my current workflow. I write anything that needs formatting in Markdown, and I like to keep notes in nvALT - which works extremely well with Markdown. I want to be able to quickly move from a note, to a draft, to a live post. Pelican fits that bill. (See what I did there?)

Additional Modifications

Pelican is configured out of the box to work as a dead-simple blog. You write a post in the content folder, then Pelican generates the static files for you - and index page with your latest posts listed, and those individual post pages. But I wanted something which would offer me the option to add an entire static site in front of the blog. And that’s easy enough to do with Pelican.
After a bit of Googling, I found a very useful comment outlining how to build a static site with a blog in a subfolder with Pelican. This allowed me to put up a static shell, and then add my blog posts at ambush.com/blog. Anything I want to keep in the forefront, I’ll share as a static page.
I also wanted to move away from the standard theme, and I’d already built a simple, one-page site with bootstrap, so I grabbed the Pelican-Bootstrap3 template, which allowed me to add in my own style changes to match my existing blog. I’ve essentially just added a /blog folder, and greatly enhanced my ability to quickly add additional pages and content. Its a great improvement.

What’s Next?

Who knows? If history is any indication, probably four or five more blog posts, and then a brief break, followed by a slower release of helpful posts. I’m also working to import some of my better content from my previous blog iterations.