The Train Station

How I'm using Pelican

I've obviously just recently got back into writing a blog or whatever you want to call this. The honest reason was because I was at home one weekend while my family was visting other family members. Just a couple of weeks prior I had bought an Ergodox 76 Hotdox which I use mainly at work. My typing has gradually gotten better but I wanted to use this time to continue to get better so I'm forcing myself to use it.

Pelican

There are many static site generators so I did a quick search for "Python static site generator" (Python is still my go to language) and an article that mentioned Pelican showed up first. I stuck with it and wanted to share how am producing these articles.

Python

As I mentioned in an earlier article I have pyenv and pipenv setup. Here is my Pipfile for https://sethtrain.github.io

[[source]]
url = "https://pypi.org/simple"
verify_ssl = true
name = "pypi"

[packages]
pelican = "*"
markdown = "*"

[scripts]
generate = "pelican content --output ."
preview = "pelican -l --output ."

[requires]
python_version = "3.7.3"

To get up and running, install these dependencies and then run pelican-quickstart. It will walk you through a couple of questions and get everything started for you. The documentation does a good job of explaining all of this.

It is pretty simple. I create a new markdown file in the content directory. When I feel like I am done I will generate the site, do a quick preview locally to see if I have any issues and then push to GitHub.

Vim

I had established a couple of <leader> bindings for Pelican projects to help me generate and preview quickly. vim-dispatch makes this possible and easy.

if filereadable("pelicanconf.py")
    nmap <leader>G :Dispatch pipenv run generate<cr>
    nmap <leader>R :Dispatch pipenv run preview<cr>
endif

Have fun!