Publishing with Pelican
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:date: 2015-01-27 06:00
:modified: 2015-01-26 21:30
:tags: pelican, nginx, networksec, frqrec, social media, vim
:slug: publishing-with-pelican
:category: webdev
:summary: Some links and information on publishing with Pelican
:authors: David Runge

| I haven't done serious web development work in quite some time. There are reasons for that.
| Mostly because I have been busy being a |sys_admin| instead...
|
| A reason for now doing this kind of work for myself again, is my departure from a lot of social media websites like Facebook (no, no link here).
| The reasons for that are quite obvious, apart from the general evilness of large companies, agencies and governments alike (especially when looking at the developments in European and US-American politics in the past few months, or rather years).
|
| After some changes in my hosting plans (moving away from |hosteurope| to |nwsec|, but more on that soon), this also involved dividing private content from that of the association (|frqrec|) I am working with.
|
| Ultimately this led me to the decision to find a publishing tool that was not depending on a database setup (like |wordpress| is), but rather something text file based (also because I am a daily |vim| user).
| Say hello to |pelican|, a Python based static website generator!
| With Pelican one can write content in |markdown| or |restructuredtext| and have simple |pelican-themes|) and the site generator take care of the rest. Pretty awesome! A separate |makefile| (besides the easy possibility of local testing) makes it possible to push a new website version directly to the webserver or other destinations.
| Currently I've started work on some static pages and my own theme, cloned from the |notmyidea-theme|. Now my whole website can be conveniently developed in my own |website-git| repository.
|
| Although for newbie users a login backend for administering a website (like the one Wordpress offers) is a very easy solution, it also introduces security issues (bad passwords, hacked computers & malware, PHP bugs, bad content, bad plugins, etc.).
| I'm glad I've found a very lightweight and fast solution in Pelican, that works well with |nginx|.


.. |sys_admin| raw:: html

  <a href="http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/iuk/lehrrechnerbereich" target="_blank">sys admin</a>

.. |hosteurope| raw:: html

  <a href="https://www.hosteurope.de/" target="_blank">Hosteurope</a>

.. |nwsec| raw:: html

  <a href="https://networksec.de" target="_blank">NetworkSEC</a>

.. |frqrec| raw:: html

  <a href="http://frqrec.de" target="_blank">Freakquenzy Records</a>

.. |wordpress| raw:: html

  <a href="http://www.wordpress.org/" target="_blank">Wordpress</a>

.. |vim| raw:: html

  <a href="http://www.vim.org/" target="_blank">Vim</a>

.. |pelican| raw:: html

  <a href="http://blog.getpelican.com/" target="_blank">Pelican</a>

.. |markdown| raw:: html

  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown" target="_blank">Markdown</a>

.. |restructuredtext| raw:: html

  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText" target="_blank">ReStructuredText</a>

.. |pelican-themes| raw:: html

  <a href="http://pelican-themes-gallery.place.org/" target="_blank">themes</a>

.. |makefile| raw:: html

  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makefile" target="_blank">Makefile</a>

.. |notmyidea-theme| raw:: html

  <a href="https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes/tree/master/notmyidea-cms" target="_blank">notmyidea cms theme</a>

.. |website-git| raw:: html

  <a href="https://git.sleepmap.de/websites/sleepmap.git/" target="_blank">git</a>

.. |nginx| raw:: html

  <a href="https://nginx.org/" target="_blank">nginx</a>