Hello World

I have recently begun working professionally with Python and decided in order to truly have any fun, I needed to dive in with some of my free time. For a while I have been interested in starting a blog. Being more keen on static site generation than WordPress configuration and wanting to learn python - I started looking for a python solution for a personal blog.

After a few minutes of googling I gave Hyde a try. Installed everything, got everything working, building, got real excited, etc … and then decided it wasn’t for me. Not really sure what turned me off. Kept looking and found Pelican which had some great documentation and lot of activity on the project. Now here you are reading a hello world blog entry written in Markdown, built with pelican, and hosted on GitHub.

I am currently using OS X and the Terminal app. Here’s what I did …

Python

First install packages pip, virtualenv, and virtualenvwrapper.

sudo easy_install pip
sudo pip install virtualenv
sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper

Update ~/.bash_profile by adding:

export WORKON_HOME="${HOME}/.virtualenvs"
export PROJECT_HOME="${HOME}/Documents/Developer"
export VIRTUALENVWRAPPER_SCRIPT="/usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh"
source "/usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper_lazy.sh"
export PIP_VIRTUALENV_BASE="${WORKON_HOME}"
export PIP_RESPECT_VIRTUALENV=true

Please read the virtualenvwrapper reference.

Pelican

Create a virtual environment for the project.

mkvirtualenv michaelreneer.github.io

Setup the project.

mkdir ~/Documents/Developer/michaelreneer.github.io
cd ~/Documents/Developer/michaelreneer.github.io
setvirtualenvproject

Install the pelican and Markdown packages.

pip install pelican Markdown

Run pelican quickstart.

pelican-quickstart

Install pelican-plugins.

cd ~/Documents/Developer/
git clone https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-plugins

Please read the pelican documentation.

GitHub

I have experimented a little with how the project lives in GitHub and locally. To start, the static html in the master branch of the project named USERNAME.github.io is served up as your user page. Free hosting.

I first tried organizing the source that generated the html as a subdirectory in the master branch. This was nice because I had only one branch to manage; but because everything was in one branch, managing pull requests would be more complicated since I would only want to merge changes that updated the source.

I ended up pushing the source to the source branch and the content to the master branch. This way I can automatically decline all pull requests to the master branch. Locally, I have each branch cloned into a different directory named for the branch.

Eventually, I will script the process so that immediately after I push to the source branch, my pelican build runs, copies its output to the master branch, and finished by pushing the master branch. Eliminating any branch switching antics.