Pelican is an underdog among static site generators but still has a very simple mental model [1] of readers, writers and generators.So it becomes easy to extend and work with. Not sure why it’s not as popular, but after working with Jekyll, Hugo and Nikola Pelican seems better designed with decent code structure. From the documentation:<p><i>“What Pelican does is take a list of files and process them into some sort of output. Usually, the input files are reStructuredText and Markdown files, and the output is a blog, but both input and output can be anything you want.”</i><p>[1] <a href="https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#overall-structure" rel="nofollow">https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#overall...</a>
Here comes the "I use org mode BTW" comment.<p>When it comes to my personal websites, I use org mode, because publishing is actually an exception in my day to day life. I use emacs for org mode only, but I use it all day long to keep notes, track todos, document projects, write prose and messages. Sometimes, I think something is worth publishing, so I mark it with the appropriate tags, run the publish command and let syncthing update the websites.<p>I have used hugo for a dozen significant project and I like it. I have chosen hugo over the alternatives because I prefer go to javascript, ruby and python in almost all possible regards.
I even teach classes to journalism students with hugo and gitlab.<p>Static site generators are great for "projects" but as a individual willing to share some mildly interesting content as a side effect of his daily activities, I still consider them too much work and maintenance.
For anybody that wants to start with pelican I had written a tutorial post about it at <a href="https://spapas.github.io/2013/10/07/pelican-static-windows/" rel="nofollow">https://spapas.github.io/2013/10/07/pelican-static-windows/</a>.<p>Also that blog is made with pelican and hosted with GitHub pages so you can see some of pelican's features. I'm using it for more than 7 years and am really happy with it (the fact that I am familiar with python and can debug some problems myself definitely helps)
Does Pelican allow to use external content files that are not written in Markdown? I'd like to load content from a JSON file to enrich certain pages or even create whole site structures dynamically. I couldn't find anything related in neither the documentation nor the plugin repo.<p>edit: It seems one might be able to write a custom reader for that according to <a href="https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#how-to-implement-a-new-reader" rel="nofollow">https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#how-to-...</a>
My blog (ahelwer.ca) uses Hugo hosted on gitlab pages; I notice that privacy badger flags two trackers on it, cloudflare CDN and google fonts. I'm assuming gfonts is because the Hugo theme I'm using uses a google-provided font and cloudflare CDN is there because it's automatically added by gitlab or something; anyone know how you can create a completely tracker-free experience? Do you basically have to stand up your own webserver on a cloud provider (or at home)? I guess without cloudflare or some other CDN you'd also have to hope your server can handle serving all the traffic directly. Or would a different static site generator like pelican help?
I have tried couple of them. Then I realised all I needed was some HTML, few lines of CSS, and zero JS and definitely no static site generator.<p>I am not saying no one else needs it. However, the majority of sites I've seen that are generated via static site generators are using static site generators just because they can.
I'd never heard of Pelican but I have to say their site is doing an really bad job at explaining what it does and how :)<p>I'd expect some screenshots and some points. All I learned from reading it is that it supports markdown but not really what kind of site it's for (e.g. blogs like wordpress etc).<p>I'm looking for a static generator to make a blog (static mainly for security and because I don't want to do anything complex anyway). But not sure if this will suffice.
I am a Pelican user and I love it. My blog is made with Pelican. I also tried Hugo, Gatsby, and Jekyll, but they require much more orchestation than Pelican. There are two areas that can be improved: documentation and themes. I got difficulties trying to customize my blog (syntax highlighting, integration with jupyter notebooks, latex support, and so on). Most of the time the answers were in another blog, not in the docs. Also, the default theme is not attractive for new users. That prevents them to even give it a try.
A comprehensive list of static site generators can be found at <a href="https://www.staticgen.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.staticgen.com/</a>
I have used Jekyll for years on a GitHub pages site. I like working with Jekyll overall, but the site has grown to a moderate size and now it takes about 8 seconds to render changes locally. When I started a new personal site last year I went with Hugo because one of its main selling points is speed.<p>Can anyone share how Pelican's rendering speed compares to Jekyll and Hugo?
Incase it benefits others, I did a brief survey of static site generators and while Pelican looked great it had more functionality than I needed.<p>I ended up using staticjinja instead. And after sticking with it for over a year now, I'd still recommend it if Pelican features like RSS feeds and code syntax highlighting seem like overkill for your project.