Create a blog using Pelican

Date: February 17th 2018

Last updated: February 17th 2018

I created a blog using "Pelican, which takes great advantage of Python". Heres what I did and heres the site.

References

http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.3/quickstart.html
http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.3/pelican-themes.html
http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.3/tips.html

Setup virtualenv

mkvirtualenv pelican -p python3

Install pelican

pip install pelican
pip install Markdown
pip install typogrify
pip install ghp-import

Create project

cd repos && mkdir blog 
pelican-quickstart

Set up git & github repo

Install of Git and setup of Github repo not shown here.

#(pelican) ray:~/repos/blog
git init
git remote add origin https://github.com/rayblick/blog.git
git add .
git commit -m "initial commit"
git push origin master
#username
#pwd

Add an article

# repos/blog/content
nano article1.md

Add content to article

Title: Article One
Date: 2018-02-03 19:08
Modified: 2018-02-03 19:08
Category: test
Tags: blog
Authors: Ray Blick
Summary: Testing out pelican

## Aim

My first article

Add about page (and add content)

cd content/pages
nano about.md

Download Pelican-themes

cd ..

# repos (outside of blog)
git clone --recursive https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes pelican-themes

File structure

The pelican-themes folder contains many files so it is ignored in this command and added in as an example.

# ignore pelican-themes folder
tree -I 'pelican-themes'

├── pelican-themes # (added as example)
│
├── blog
│   ├── content
│   │   ├── article1.md
│   │   ├── images
│   │   │   └── img1.jpg
│   │   └── pages
│   │       └── about.md
│   ├── develop_server.sh
│   ├── fabfile.py
│   ├── Makefile
│   ├── output
│   │
│   ├── pelicanconf.py
│   ├── publishconf.py

Modify pelicanconf.py

# --- snipped ---

#Uncomment localhost for development 
#SITEURL = 'http://localhost:8000' 
SITEURL = 'https://rayblick.github.io/blog'

# Social widget
SOCIAL = (('linkedin', 'https://www.linkedin.com/in/ray-blick-93b359b5'),
          ('github', 'https://github.com/rayblick'),
          ('twitter', 'https://twitter.com/Ray_Blick'),
          )
# Specify name of a built-in theme
THEME = "../themes/pelican-themes/pelican-blue"

# Theme setup
SIDEBAR_DIGEST = 'my blog'
DISPLAY_PAGES_ON_MENU = True
TWITTER_USERNAME = 'Ray_Blick'
MENUITEMS = (('Blog', SITEURL),('About', SITEURL+'/pages/About.html'),)


STATIC_PATHS = ['images']

Run pelican to create blog pages

cd repos/blog
pelican content

Push to gh-pages

ghp-import output
git push origin gh-pages

pelican basics