Goodbye Octopress, Hello Pelican

About a year ago I switched my blog from WordPress to Octopress.

Octopress

I enjoyed the simplicity of Octopress (once it was setup), but over time I found myself blogging less which wasn’t good.

Octopress is based on Ruby and despite my best efforts I could never get it running well on Windows. I ended up settng up a VM running a lightweight Linux distro. I setup Dropbox on the VM as well as my desktop and could then share my Octopress files between the two.

I could craft Octopress posts anywhere, but to publish them I’d have to crank up the VM which was always a pain.

So I went looking for other static blog engines to see what else was out there.

Pelican

There are a lot of static site generators out there, running on a variety of languages including Python, Ruby and node.js.

Octopress was Ruby based so I decided to elimate anything requiring Ruby. I’ve tinkered with Python on Windows before and had good luck so I decided to focus my choices on Python powered blogs.

I decided to go with Pelican in the end. It was one of the older generators, supported all the things I was looking for and had excellent documentation.

Nikola was my second choice. I may set that up locally and see how it compares to Pelican.

Bootstrap

One thing WordPress has going for it is a vast choice of themes. While there are several nice themes for Pelican I didn’t like any of them. Several were using Bootstrap so I decided to write my own which would give me the opportunity to try out Bootstrap.

Bootstrap is a great way to quickly knock out a decent looking site. Using it does give your site a ‘Bootstrapy’ look about it which is difficult to avoid but it’s just my blog so I’m not too concerned. While I’m happy with what I ended up with I may take the opportunity to try out some of the other CSS frameworks (YAML, Foundadaion, Skeleton) to see how they compare.