Background
Well, I've succumbed to the ever-present urge to completely change one's blog setup. It all started when I wanted to add my blog to the Awesome PyLadies' blogs repo. As part of the configuration you can add your blog's RSS feed (structured information about a blog's contents). But the configuration says:
if you wish to have your blog posts being promoted by the Mastodon bot; the RSS feed should be for Python-related posts
My previous blog generator was zola, which worked really well and was easy to set up! However, zola does not support per-tag (or "taxonomy" as zola calls them) feeds. I considered contributing support for this to zola, but I figured I'd look around at other static site generators and see what they support. My blog content is just a bunch of Markdown files after all, so it should be easy to move to another static site generator!
Yak shaving, for fun and profit
I came across Pelican, which was really appealing for a few reasons. First, it supported per-feed RSS feeds. But also, it is written in Python and I felt like it would be fitting since I am a Pythonista. So I decided I would try to port my blog to Pelican. As you may be able to tell by looking at the footer, I did so successfully :)
Setting up Pelican is actually super easy. I installed pelican with markdown support by running uv tool install pelican[markdown] and ran pelican-quickstart to set up a project. After answering a few prompts, I had a full project set up and could copy over the Markdown files used to write this blog. After changing the metadata from zola's format to Pelican's, I had a blog generated... with no theme.
Oh... I needed to see what themes were available. Fortunately Pelican makes this easy by going to the pelicanthemes.com website. That site has a number of community authored themes. Unfortunately, I didn't see any themes I loved.
Introducing pelican-theme-terminimal
So, I did the only natural thing to do and ported the zola theme I was using to Pelican. Fortunately, this wasn't actually too bad. Zola uses Tera for its templates, which is based on Jinja2, which is what Pelican uses. So for the most part I could minimally update the variables used and get the theme ported over easily. The layout between the two is slightly different so I had to restructure how things are designed, but overall it was pretty easy and enjoyable.
You can check out the theme's code here. I don't plan on working on the theme a ton more, mostly just to add features or customizations I want, but it is open source if anyone else wants to use it or submit patches.
The top priorities I have to work on are:
- Links to RSS feeds
- Mastodon verification
So yeah, my blog is now running on Pelican and Python 🎉
I have a few ideas to blog about over the next week or two so check back soon, or subscribe to my RSS feed.