Pythons, Pelicans, and Posts

As most web developers are want to do more often than most, I’ve changed the tech underlying my blog. My first blog was a custom PHP beast completely hand-written by me and found at paulmclanahan.com sometime around 2001. In the time since I’ve tried wordpress, blogspot, and tumblr, and moved to paulm.us and now pmac.io. I’ve not felt fully comfortable since relinquishing control of the hosting and technology of my site. I’ve also moved from PHP to Python as my primary programming language of choice. So much so in fact that I do everything in my power to avoid reading or writing PHP. I’m truly spoiled by Python and I’m much happier there. So clearly I needed a blogging platform that is Python-based so that I can hack on it and not dread the code, which also means I need to wrest full control of the code back from my lazy days of hosted platforms (wordpress.com, tumblr, etc.).

I’ve also grown fond of the idea of a fully static site. Blogs don’t change much (at least not the way I do them). So to the engineer in me it makes very little sense to have a database and application server running to dynamically construct HTML for requests. Said HTML should be generated when I post something new, and only then. This is especially true now that I’ve grown fond of the trend of not having comments on blogs. Comment forms just invite security issues, spam, and anonomyous trolls. I could have easily added commenting via Disqus or Facebook, but I’m taking a queue from a favorite Mozillian of mine and just putting a “respond on twitter” link at the bottom of every post. This way if you want to berate me, you’ll have to at least let me see your twitter handle, or go to the trouble of creating a burner account.

So, with those decisions made I was faced with the decision of finding a decent Python-based static site generator or writing one? I had plans to do the latter. It was to be called “Trogdor” and it would burninate your village as you published your peasant pages. Lack of free time delayed those plans enough that I found a great version of what I wanted to do already existed. It’s called Pelican and it uses all the things I wanted. It’s quite hackable (has a nice plugin system), it uses Jinja2 for templating, you can write posts in Markdown or reStructuredText, and the post metadata is contained in the post files themselves.

Once all that was decided it was a simple matter of finding a theme and hacking it to bits. Pelican has the great advantage of a burgeoning community forming around it, so there are several plugins and templates out there to get you started. I chose Sundown and am pretty happy with it. I’ll keep tweaking and may change it entirely, but Pelican makes that very easy.

Because I have switched around a lot I do have some post history. For various reasons I ditched all my posts when I switched to Tumblr. But I did want to bring the tumblrs with me to the new system. This new platform allows me to have post urls I like, unlike tumblr. But I don’t like link-rot, so I needed a way to redirect the old URLs to the new home for the post. The wrinkle is that I wanted to host the site on Github Pages which has no server-side redirect capabilities. So I wrote my own plugin that would allow you to set an “alias” on your posts that would cause Pelican to output html files at the old URL locations that contained the proper meta-refresh tag to redirect the user to the new URL, and tell Google that the post has moved when next they spider. Only after I had it working of course did I find pelican-alias, which does all those things, only better, and to which I’ve switched.

I did have one more thing I wanted though, and could not find anything existing to do it. I wanted to be able to easily link to bugs in Mozilla’s Bugzilla, and issues and pull-requests on Github. So I wrote and released pelican-link-bugs. It allows you to easily link to things like bug 765645, or issue mozilla/bedrock#1127. It’s also very easy (if you know regular expressions) to add your own search-and-replace-with-link patterns.

So there you have it. The blog is moved, the code is new, and the first new post is all about all of that. If you got this far I’m quite impressed. Thanks for taking the time.