Don Bisdorf

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Articles in the Software category

New Blog

Wed 11 May 2022 | Software

I've rebuilt my blog again, discarding Grav in favor of Pelican. Grav worked fine, but I'm switching to Pelican because:

  • Either Grav doesn't do blogs very well, or I can't figure out how to make Grav do blogs. My older blog posts just disappeared, and there was no easy way for a user to access them. I tried playing with configuration and plugins and never found a solution I liked. Pelican, on the other hand, seems to be be blog-focused and its web sites provide a variety of ways for users to navigate to older posts.

  • I've been administering and posting to my blog through Grav's interactive web interface. This web interface is a possible avenue that someone could use to gain unauthorized access to my web server. There's probably a way to disable Grav's admin page, but without it, I'd need to figure out another way to post content to my site. Pelican's workflow is simpler; I write content locally (in Markdown), run Pelican to convert my content into a static web site, and then upload the resulting HTML/CSS files by whatever means I prefer.

  • Any software running on my web server is a point of failure. I have to maintain it and patch it regularly. Removing Grav removes a point of failure and removes some administrative work. Pelican doesn't actually run on my server; I run it on my workstation, and then I just upload the generated web site. All that's left on my server is the actual HTML/CSS files.

  • I like tinkering with stuff.

The biggest down side with Pelican so far is that I haven't found a pre-built theme that I like and that doesn't have Javascript in it. I'm trying to avoid Javascript so my web site will be smaller and quicker and will have fewer external dependencies. So I've built my own theme, which you're looking at. It isn't fancy, but it's functional, and it should be legible (I hope) no matter what you're using to view it.


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