Web Site Generation

I started of wanting to cleanup my resume and determined that it was time to cleanup my entire site that pretty much feel off into bit rot.

So I started looking around at some Static Site Generators. Gitlab provides some really nice templates for their CI that already have some Pages configurations. I started with Hexo.

Hexo

I'm not a huge node guy, so I wanted to try and learn something new. So I started my node docker container, but first i had to add a shell function so I don't have to type docker run ... all the time.

npmenv(){ if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then ver=$1 else ver='4.2.2' fi name=$(echo $ver|awk '{sub(/\./, "-"); print}') container="node:$ver" docker run --hostname node$name -it -v ${PWD}:/src -w /src \ ${container} /bin/bash }

So now that I'm in my new docker container with an overlay directory in my docker container I started on the road the road to creating an awesome static content site. I got the basic "Hello World setup". Which was pretty neat.

Honeymoon over

The more and more I played with this, I found that the templating scheme was more of a "here's some basic things, now make the template do what you want".
Call me crazy, but I shouldn't be making changes to the contents of the template's _config.yml. Anything in the highest level _config.yml should take precedence over what's in the theme. I found this most anoying, finding code in the template's like: theme.customize.post_count. I would think that it would be customize.post_count. After I realized I didn't like Hexo and wanted to get this project moving on I moved on to Pelican.

Pelican

Gitlab also had a nice template for pelican to get started with. Since, my earlier frustrations with Hexo, I pleased to find that themes in Pelican work as expected, So from my earlier commment about calling me crazy, well these developers don't.

I already have a nice wrapper docker python environments.

pyenv(){ if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then ver=$1 else ver='2.7' fi case $ver in '2.6') name="2-6" container='terzom/python' ;; *) name=$(echo $ver|awk '{sub(/\./, "-"); print}') container="python:$ver" ;; esac docker run --hostname py$name -it -v ${PWD}:/src -w /src \ ${container} /bin/bash }

I'm using the pelican-bootstrap3. I had to fork it and roll back internationalization. There was an outstanding bug with gettext and Jinja2.

The performance and simplicity of creating content is quite nice. I was able to quickly add the ability to embed gists and convert images to thumbs, so they don't take up 100% of the browser window.

Conclusion

Well not that my opinion much matters. I'm quite happy with Pelican, and I will continue to use it. It's simple and does exactly what I expect/need.