Hello World!

Posted on Sat 09 January 2016 in general

After using this domain only for some private projects for the last couple of years, I decided to relaunch a new public webpage. Instead of writing my own CMS - which I guess would have been fun, but too time consuming - and after discarding the idea of writing static HTML files - that is so nineties - I was looking for an existing webpage system solution. For most webpage owners the story ends here by just picking some popular software; such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla; but I was rather looking for a small lightweight system including the following features:

  • Only a basic feature set instead of a Jack of all trades
  • As little dependencies as possible and particularly, flat files instead of a database system as backend
  • Small, but neat codebase and not too main stream to be less attractive for attackers

To find such as system, I started some research and stumbled upon the article 10 Open Source Blogging Platforms for Developers which provides some reasonable suggestions for simple blogging systems.

After testing some of the presented tools and doing further investigations, I decided to pick Pelican as winner for several reasons:

  • Pelican is written in Python - one of my favourite programming languages - and it uses Jinja2 as template engine, which I really like and have used in various projects
  • Pelican supports themes so you can easily choose an existing theme and concentrate on the content, before struggling with the design of the webpage
  • Pelican uses Markdown or reStructuredText for the content of the webpages, which is easy to understand and editable as plaintext files
  • Pelican provides additional features, such as Atom/RSS feeds and code syntax highlighting via Pygments, out of the box
  • Pelicans output are static HTML files that can be used with any webserver, i.e. fast delivery of webpages even on devices with with little performance

By now, I really like Pelican due to its structure and its use of the KISS principle - so lets see how it performs in the long run...

Happy blogging!

general blog