James CookeJames Cooke

Setting up this homepage with Pelican

This page has been through a lot in the last ten years.

Since starting work at Quibly, I’ve had a lot more time to code and it’s exactly what I wanted, hopefully it’ll continue. The result of that is that I’ve got more to write about… The code that I develop at work, fixes I make to open source libraries and general things I learn, primarily about Python and web - hopefully all valuable and worth sharing.

I’m experimenting with Pelican - a static blog generator written in Python. It’s excellent and noticeably easier than Jekyll - probably because I’m much more clued up in Python than Ruby. I’m lazy, so I’m hosting the outputted static files in the gh-pages branch of the blog’s repository to take advantage of GitHub Pages’ free hosting features - thanks GitHub!

In addition, I found this article by David Fischer very helpful. Particularly the suggestion of adding the CNAME copy command to the Makefile to get GitHub Pages one configuration requirement and gph-import working nicely together. Plus David pointed out that Pelican already has a github target in the Makefile which I hadn’t noticed and is now what I use to push articles live.

All in all - great and simple.