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+.. title: Rework with Nikola
+.. slug: rework-with-nikola
+.. date: 2019-04-21 00:30:05 UTC+02:00
+.. tags: nikola, pelican
+.. category: webdev
+.. link: 
+.. description: 
+.. type: text
+
+To revive my blog, I have spent the last few days converting my website from
+|pelican| to |nikola|.
+So far the experience has been quite great and I'll try to shortly sum up why.
+
+.. TEASER_END
+
+For me, the use of static site generators has always been about ease of use and
+robustness. However, with |pelican| I eventually found myself in a situation
+with too many customizations (theme, functionality only achievable through
+extra plugins). This obviously proved quite limiting.
+
+I looked around for other static site generators already more than a year ago:
+By now there are |static_site_generators|. Languages such as |Ruby| or
+|javascript| (in whatever hip framework of the day) were an absolute no-go for
+me, but I wanted something that could potentially do templates in Jinja2, which
+is quite powerful and versatile and I had already gotten acquainted with
+through working with |ansible|.
+|nikola| provides just that, being Python based (like |pelican|).
+
+Last year I had the opportunity to work with |nikola| on the website for
+|lac2018|, which was a very pleasant experience. There I was able to integrate
+scripts (in a disgusting way, I have to admit) to scrape calendar events and
+turn their information into pages and automatically deploy it and additional
+data required for our streaming service with the |voc|.
+
+This week I finally pulled the plug on the old theme and way of building and
+deploying my website. This felt quite good, as I deleted quite a few things.
+The advantages of |nikola| over |pelican| became apparent very early:
+
+* Less fragmentation: The CLI is much cleaner, there is only one configuration
+  file
+* Easier integration: Multi-level pages, navigation menu, image galleries and
+  robots.txt generation without hackery and additional plugins
+* more strict use of ReStructuredText
+
+In the end I was quite happy to not deal with so many custom solutions anymore
+and even exchanged my custom theme with one of the current default ones. That
+being said: Theming seems also more straight forward to customize... I just
+didn't feel like doing that.
+
+Closing, I would like to add, that I hope this will lead to a more frequent
+release flow on my website again. As you can imagine *a lot* has changed since
+2016. More on that in the upcoming posts. Promise!
+
+.. |pelican| raw:: html
+
+  <a href="http://blog.getpelican.com/" target="_blank">Pelican</a>
+
+.. |nikola| raw:: html
+
+  <a href="https://getnikola.com/" target="_blank">Nikola</a>
+
+.. |static_site_generators| raw:: html
+
+  <a href="https://www.staticgen.com/" target="_blank">plenty</a>
+
+.. |ruby| raw:: html
+
+  <a href="https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/" target="_blank">Ruby</a>
+
+.. |javascript| raw:: html
+
+  <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript" target="_blank">JavaScript</a>
+
+.. |ansible| raw:: html
+
+  <a href="https://www.ansible.com/" target="_blank">Ansible</a>
+
+.. |lac2018| raw:: html
+
+  <a href="https://lac.linuxaudio.org/2018/" target="_blank">Linux Audio Conference 2018</a>
+
+.. |voc| raw:: html
+
+  <a href="https://c3voc.de" target="_blank">VOC</a>