willo.gd/en

A bit of a meta post about the construction of this blog. Over the years I have got so much neat information and assistance from blogs, that I thought it time to finally do my own.

After spending sometime in the past working with Wordpress, I knew I wanted a static site generator - I have to manage a full web stack for my day job, so wanted something simple needing no love at all. I looked at Jekyll but because it's Ruby I kept looking. I then came accross Pelican. It uses Markdown and after installing it just seemed to work great.

Next up was hosting. I was going down the S3 route, but came accross Github Pages. I've come quite late to Github, but now love it, so seemed like worth trying. Again this worked super well. After creating a new repo, creating the gh-pages branch, added a file named CNAME in the root that contained my custom domain, then in DNS pointed my custom domain at willogden.github.io, everything just worked. I can (will) write a blog post, run the pelican generate command, and then git add/commit/push straight to Github and the site is published.

I then wanted to build a theme for Pelican and decided on using purecss.io. I have since found this has already been done, but for me it was an exercise to try it out and see what was involved in writing a theme (answer is not a lot). Having to re-run the pelican command whenever I made a change to the theme began to become tedious...quickly. Step in Grunt. In my last role I had been on the frontend and using Grunt for the last 12 months, so was my go to tool for task running. Below is the Grunt file I came up with. This does the following:

• Runs the Python simple HTTP server to serve up the site
• Watches for changes to the content and theme folders and re-generates the site if it sees any changes
• Live reloads the browser

It's pretty simple. Only thing to note is that I'm using a fork of the original shell Grunt contrib. This allows processes to be spawned asychronously so that the Python HTTP server can just sit in the background serving up the site whilst the watch task runs in the foreground. Here's the Gruntfile.

module.exports = function(grunt) {

    grunt.initConfig({
    pkg: grunt.file.readJSON('package.json'),

    shell: {
        pelican: {
            command: 'pelican'
        },
        server: {
          command: 'python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8888',
          options: {
            async: true
          }
        }
    },

    watch: {
      files: ['content/**/*.md','themes/**/*.*'],
      tasks: ['shell:pelican'],
      options: {
        // Start a live reload server on the default port 35729
        livereload: true,
      }
    }
    });

    grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-shell-spawn');
    grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-watch');


    grunt.registerTask('default', ['shell:server','watch']);

};