Trying out Pelican

So as I mentioned in my first post, I decided to start my blog using Jekyll because it seemed to be the most widely used while still being fairly lightweight. However, as I began to look at trying to customize the site, I found the structure and templating system a little bit weird and unfamiliar.

I use Python a lot in my day job, and after looking through the documentation pelican I liked it’s Pythonic style. Also, I tended to like the Pelican themes better than the ones for Jekyll.

Since both Jekyll and pelican use markdown for their HTML generation, it’s fairly easy to create blogs for both of them. I may host one at blog.jasonrhaas.com/jek and one at blog.jasonrhaas.com/pel and then just have one or the other redirect to the main domain. The only real difference for post generation is the top header information. For example, on Jekyll, it looks like this:

---
layout: 
title: Trying Out Pelican
categories: [blogs]
tags: [blogs, pelican]
published: True
---

And on Pelican, it looks like this:

Title: Trying Out Pelican
Date: 2015-03-21
Category: blogs

My plan is to control all of My blog posts in a separate repository that only contains markdown information. I will create a fabric deployment for each type of blog. For example,

def jek_prep():
    local("cp *.md ~/repos/jek-blog/_posts")
    # + other tasks
def pel_prep():
    local("cp *.md ~/repos/pel-blog/content")
    # + other tasks

For reference, here is my fabric deploy for the jekyll blog.

from fabric.api import local

host = 'jasonrhaas.com'

def test():
    local("jekyll serve --watch")

def prep():
    local("git add -p && git commit")
    local("git push")

def deploy():
    local("jekyll build")
    local("scp -r _site jasonrhaas.com:~")