nerdery
Deciding what static site generator to use was tricky. The first option was Jekyll which is ruby and I'm looking for something python. Next I looked at Hyde but that had the extra requirement of Django. I feel like all I need something super simple that has the bare minimum to poop out content from markdown.
Then I finally found Pelican and it seems to satisfy all of my needs: python, ultra simple integration with heroku via this buildout!
> pelican-quickstart
That will take you through a wizard to create a project structure like:
yourproject/
├── content
│ └── (pages)
├── output
├── develop_server.sh
├── fabfile.py
├── Makefile
├── pelicanconf.py # Main settings file
└── publishconf.py # Settings to use when ready to publish
> make regenerate
Any time you make a change to a piece of content the site is rebuilt.
This is what I ended up with for a rough rough draft, from examples in pelican-themes repo
mytheme/
├── static/
│ └── css/
│ └── fonts/
│ └── images/
└── templates/
└── includes/
│ └── _article.html
└── article.html
└── base.html
└── index.html
└── page.html
Added this to the bottom of my _article.html
{% if article.tags %}
<div class="tags">
<i class="fa fa-tags"></i>
{% for tag in article.tags %}
<a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ tag.url }}">{{ tag }}</a>{% if not loop.last %}, {% endif %}
{% endfor %}
</div>
{% endif %}
Added this to my menu, the "blog" is just a link back to index, so I added that manually
<div class="menu">
<ul>
<li><a href="{{ SITEURL }}/index.html">blog</a></li>
{% for page in pages %}
<li><a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ page.url }}">{{ page.title|lower }}</a></li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
</div>
> git push heroku master
Used the assets plugin from pelican-plugins which requires the webassets python module.
{% assets filters="cssmin", output="css/packed.min.css", "css/bootstrap.min.css", "css/pygment-solarized.css", "css/main.css" %}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ ASSET_URL }}">
{% endassets %}
Created an environment variable PELICAN_SITE_URL for my virtualenv and on heroku, that way I can set it locally and test with make regenerate easily.
Signed up on disqus and got the embed code, then added the disqus_identifier, disqus_title and disqus_url extra configuration variables.
To the bottom of article.html I added:
<div class="disqus">
<div id="disqus_thread"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var disqus_shortname = 'ericcarmichaelsnerdery';
var disqus_identifier = '{{ article.url }}';
var disqus_title = '{{ article.title }}';
var disqus_url = '{{ SITEURL }}/{{ article.url }}';
(function() {
var dsq = document.createElement('script');
dsq.type = 'text/javascript';
dsq.async = true;
dsq.src = '//' + disqus_shortname + '.disqus.com/embed.js';
(document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(dsq);
})();
</script>
<noscript>Please enable JavaScript to view the <a href="http://disqus.com/?ref_noscript">comments powered by Disqus.</a></noscript>
<a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">comments powered by <span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a>
</div>
Pretty dissappointed in disqus, can't style it very easily and I feel it clashes with the style of the blog quite a bit.
Man. What a joy! Everything made sense, except for a couple hiccups with webassets that ended up being my fault, typical!
I'd recommend Pelican to anyone looking to start a simple blog, it was a joy to work with thanks to all of the hard work
that went into pelican-quickstart and the custom heroku buildout!