Christmas time with Pelican

I developed my new personal side, including blogs, over Christmas, under control of the engine Pelican, which I selected earlier this year (September).

Pelican is: matured, static, a database free, included in Debian (security updates), with acceptable dependencies, posts are archived in text files, and import of blogspot is possible.

Pelican looks very attractive, has much supporting material, plugins, and classy themes. Much of important work is derived by instrumentation of Jinja2.

Pelican application is direct, and you can make a template site within a few minutes. On the other side, adjusting by my needs, takes me a few days, perhaps due me, or Pelican authors are more oriented on:

• Blog-like sites (or derived systems like Wordpress): so I rewrote template system.
• Source formats in reStructuredText and Markdown; html (and, by the way, any tuning), should be adjusted in templates.
• New installations, which expecting empty installation directory, and requires some nontrivial path manipulations.

Fortunately, all the adjusting has been solved, giving me full satisfaction. Moreover, I has learned new CSS, HTML features due both Pelican and W3Schools.

I has tuned site face with CSS, partly derived by Munipack templates, partly by W3Schools. They’re a few experimental features: font loading by my site (GFS Baskerville and Latin Modern fonts distributed with Debian are loaded on demand), many icon-like symbols are UTF characters.

The final site has been tested with W3 validator, responsive response has been checked under development mode of Google Chrome.

My blogspot diary hroch’s diary import has been part of the process. The import process worked smoothly; results looks poorly (many errors appeared), so I spend full afternoon, and evening, with corrections, and adjusting every file by hand; it’s curious, sources has been formatted differently, various marks, strange characters has been randomly included, or disappear.

The blogspot posts are genuine as possible; only formatting of a troublesome sections has been modified, certain errors in final htmls solved, and added description to some dead links. None text modification has been made.

I added Feature flags to metadata to highlight timeless posts.

The site is archived in Mercurial, so re-generation pages for my new post is simple. I also made a simple script; one updates the artificial sky on per day basis.

The final site looks more classy,less claustrophobic, and more reading friendly (including my e-ink reader!), than the previous ones.

Only typesetting of mathematical formulas is still unsolved ‒ math plugin requires more recent Pelican, than current Debian brings. The small imperfection may be solved later.