Site update! Now using Pelican SSG

2026-04-02T00:00:00+02:00

Initially I created the site with python's Flask framework, a package called Frozen Flask and the python-markdown package. Python-markdown created the article html files, Flask created the routes and served the template pages, and Frozen Flask turned those server side generated pages into a set of static html files. I basically created a small static site generator of my own. This was a fun little thing, but for a more complex "blog" or "personal site" I decided I should switch to a more "battle tested" pre-made tool for this.

I still wanted control over the website, like what the templates would look like, the styling and some functionality. And so, I found Pelican, which is one of multiple popular python static site generators. It supports Markdown and ReStructuredText, Jija2 templates for the website layout/themes, generating RSS/Atom feeds and many more functionalities I haven't yet explored, like writing your own plugins.

The documentation is pretty nice, and even I was able to make sense of it. It took me a few hours tinkering and I was able to port my existing site layout/Jinja2 templates to it. My theme definitely doesn't support all the options which a dedicated Pelican theme would need, but for my purposes and settings it works.

So now, with this new site engine, the website has RSS/Atom feeds. I can add tags to each article, set the author(s) (if someone else wrote the article), generate new category on the fly (although in my theme, the categories have images and I have to add those manually), mark article as a draft, hide an article, set a language for the article and have it display other languages in which the article is written in, and many more options I am sure I am not even aware of right now.

Finally, I'd like to say big thanks to all the contributors of Pelican for creating this awesome tool.

danielkubica.com - Computers

Site update! Now using Pelican SSG