After running blogofile for four years (who knew it was that long with the little posting i've done :) and getting less done with it than I hoped, I finally decided to move on again. The main reason is, that Blogofile is basically unmaintained and writing custom controllers was harder than it should be (and documentation clearly lacking).

So I looked around for alternatives and found surprisingly few that were interesting to me. The requirements were:

• simple static blog compiler
• solid templating engine
• python
• markdown support

The only one that fit well was Pelican so I decided to give it a go. Migrating was surprisingly straight forward and done in basically half a day (that includes understanding Pelican, porting the CSS, moving all posts over, and implementing every missing feature I used to have in Blogofile in the Pelican templates.

I'm not 100% happy, but so far Pelican seems nice enough, everything works (even better than before). A few of the problems I have:

• the design seems unnecessarily complicated, compared to blogofile
• the error handling is quite poor, it is basically impossible to get useful error messages
• the documentation could be better (still much better than Blogofile though)
• the performance is a bit poor (but acceptable)

However, there are also positive points:

• development seems quite active
• jinja2 is a nice templating engine
• there are a lot of modules
• powerful features
• AGPL licensed

So all in all I'm happy with my choice, lets see if it stays that way. To get started, I wrote a tiny deployment tool (in zsh script), that might be useful for others - as everything on here, it is of course publicly available.

Custom modules are planned next.

By the way, in case you're wondering: yes, it looks pretty much exactly like the old site, the CSS was easy to port. Also, I finally fixed the mobile view, it is now as fully functional as the desktop site.