New year, new website. The old design worked okay, but Google's recent pagerank tweak punished my RSS aggregation trick. So I've accelerated plans to move the blog to self-hosting, which gives me more stuff to analyze and might one day cover the cost of hosting. Tight deadline though, since I want this ready in time for a conference I'm attending.

The software

The original RSS aggregation method has a number of benefits. It's lightweight, and much harder to hack. So I've looked far and wide for a similar setup for blogging, and the winner was hands down Pelican. Like Planet Venus, Pelican is Python powered, and offers a clean sepearation of content and visual design to create static sites.

While Planet Venus used RSS as input, the new site uses static files written in markup languages (I use Markdown). Pelican parses all the files and constructs the various tag pages and feeds. To import all this was a bit tricky; Livejournal's export is unique and does only a month at a time. Luckily, I keep a backup of my entire blog in Liferea, which is sqlite3 backed. So I wrote a Python script to write each entry out into the Markdown format. Stealing code from html2markdown was very handy, though it choked on a few of my more insame markups. Def check out the homepage, because the author's got an even more twisted workflow.

Pelican is available via git or via pip. Deployment is very similar to before, with a site configuration file and cronjob. I've also decided to place the site in revision control, to ease authoring, deployment and automation. Perhaps I'll set up a post commit hook for automated regeneration?

Output templates

Pelican uses The templates are implemented in Jinja2, a very close relative of Django's template system. Sandboxing really isn't a feature here, since it's used once to generate the HTML. Jinja2 is unfortunately not as documented as Django, but that's a very high bar.

I haven't looked into changing the default templates much yet, but I'll do so soon to tweak the front page. It also has many parameters for common snippets like Google Analytics and Disqus.

Disqus is a very important part of the design. Given a static blog, you might expect to not have comments, but Disqus provides a javascript interface to their system. It's like a sidewiki that sites can opt into. The major advantages are that I don't have to host comments, Disqus has a centralized profile to detect spammers with, and the javascript nature means there's less incentive to spam links in comments.

There's also a skribit widget, but I really have no idea what that's about. Content suggestions I guess? Perhaps when I'm less busy.

Web Design

The default theme is pretty nice, but it's not a fluid layout. I've placed it on my todo list to change that and to tweak the colors, but for now the default is sufficient.

I do need to look into a template or something to protect email addresses from scrapers. There was a nice rot13 trick I used previously that Markdown alone won't offer.