Working with pelican

I am a Python developer, and an active document making guy. I love making documents through Blogs and over sphinx because it helps other developers understand, and contribute on what I love to do. It has been 2 months when I started preparing the blog with Django. Yeah a Dynamic blog with Django, which fetches the blog data from a database. I was happy at that time that I could complete that stuff, but it now makes me feel sick on my thinking now. Because including database in my Blog will only put delays in blog site.

So, I tend to switch to Pelican, which is a static site generator. For documentation you can always hit on here. For now, Let us see how far we can learn here:

1. Quickstart : For a Quickstart prefer going on this blog This blog will give you complete start to your pelican project and even get your project publish on Github. It is super easy.

2. Adding Themes: For this, you have to fork Flex Theme in your project directory. Instructions are well written in Flex/README.md file by author. In your pelicanconf.py file put THEME = "~/Flex". Run make html and make serve. view the updated page. By the way, even I'm using Flex theme, it's responsive, mobile first and good looking. Don't thank me. Thank the original author.

3. Adding Content: Since we have something working now, we will now focus on making content for our blog site. All the content related to the page is written in either in .md or .rst format under content directory of your project. So, for a blog on testing we will make a testing.md file in content directory. If you do not understand what are .md files, you must google about it. It is a markdown language, that you can write your content in form of. After writing the testing.md file run make html and make serve commands in terminal to update the html files and host those updated files on your local server. I will suggest writing the content in .md file than .rst file. .md files are pretty easier to create.

4. Writing about me page: For this at first put DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU=True in pelicanconf.py file. This is the file where you will get all settings related to website being configured. when we run make html it is this file variables that are picked up by system. Do not be in hurry to view the about me page in web site, because we still have not created it. we have just enabled the settings. To create 'aboutme.html' using make html you have to write your aboutme.md or aboutme.rst file and put it under pages directory in content directory. now run make html and make serve and view the updated page.

5. Social Buttons: You can definitely add them just by putting SOCIAL = (('facebook', url ),) in pelicanconf.py. For more social configurations, you have to check about that theme. Best way to get the info of that theme is github. Some themes don't have social media handling in them. But Flex does and that is why it is amazing.

6. Adding syntax highlighting: For implementing the syntax highlighting in your blog, you just have to write your code snippet between two ``. Remember default pygment used is github, you can always change that. It depends on the theme you are using.

I hope this gives you the quick start good enough to create your own blog and host it via github pages.