Web development?
When I was originally thinking about a blog I wasn’t really interested in doing the building and design of the website myself myself, I wanted something functional straight out of the gate. I had heard of static website generators before and they seemed like the right choice for a simple blog. I don’t need any fancy javascript libraries to write things down, I want it to be fast but still look presentable of course. My initial search landed me on various websites listing many different static website generator applications, way more than I initially expected. Due to having recently done a hobby project in Python (Might write about that another time..) I landed on the static site generated called Pelican.
Pelican
Pelican is based on Python and I thought the language might be relevant in case I wanted to make some changes. Out of the box it is very easy to set up a basic website using just the quick-start afterwards you can get right to writing content. The quick start consists of just four steps and afterwards you’re good to go. After some tinkering I had a running blog with an article but the default style of Pelican was kinda boring to me. I looked through the various community created themes as well but nothing really popped out which had the functionality I was looking for. Seeing that I wasn’t really going to need to touch any Python with Pelican I decided to pivot to a different Tool.
Jekyll
Jekyll is from what I’ve seen probably the most popular static website generator around the web right now. This of course like most things on the internet leads to a lot of community support for it. Before committing to setting it up I went looking for a fitting theme that I liked. After a bit of searching on jekyllthemes.org website I landed on the “Hydeout” Theme. I like the clean aesthethic as well as that it’s well documented and allows for some easy customizations. As you can see it looks slightly different from the current iteration of this blog, I didn’t change much but I tinkered a little bit with the font size and coloring. The quick start for Jekyll is even simpler than the one for Pelican and just like Pelican you can regenerate within seconds and view your latest changes in your browser.
So each of the articles you write for both Jekyll and Pelican can be written in markdown. Markdown is a broadly supported text markup language which you can use to format almost awny document. Starting a new article for a Jekyll blog is as simple as writing a few lines that tell Jekyll some things about your new post. Below are the properties for this exact post.
—
layout: post
title: “Static blog generators”
date: 2022-11-02 15:54:21 +0100
categories: TIL
—
It designates the layout as a post, adds a title, a date and the category it will be published to. Below it you can just write away and format the text using markdown. The workflow this brings is a lot of fun to me, I can easily take markdown and live format the blog posts all local without any extra software. It makes the bar for writing a blog post very low, atleast it does for me. I recommend you to try it out and let me know if you managed went through and started your own blog.
