By default, GitHub pages uses Jekyll as the static website generator. It worked fine but I wanted to use tools based on one of my favorite languages, Python. I found the excellent tool Pelican so I decided to port my Jekyll site to Pelican.

The markdown files were the easiest things to port since I just had to add a bit of metadata. In particular I liked Jekyll's way of using a filename to determine the date but Pelican didn't seem to do that (I haven't looked at all of the Pelican Plugins though).

The biggest issue was that I had put my custom theme in the source tree with the site source files and I didn't see an easy way to using that theme, especially once I setup the GitHub workflow. The solution was simple enough in that you just have to create a separate public repo for your theme but it did take some time to get it all sorted out.

There was excellent documentation on how to use Pelican with GitHub pages using a custom workflow and I just followed the directions and was successful. The workflow tools on GitHub are quite useful and can give you a lot of feedback.

All in all it wasn't too bad to do the port and I'm a lot happier. I've already wanted to see how something worked in Pelican and it was much easier for me to read the Python than knock the rust(ha!) off of my Ruby knowledge.

I'm going to create other static sites so I needed some background on how to use Pelican. This blog provided a good platform to learn how to do that.