Write a post about moving to Pelican

content/blog/2019-11-05-moving-to-pelican.rst

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+Moving to Pelican
+#################
+
+:date: 2019-11-05T07:05Z
+:status: published
+
+I spent the last few days with moving this site from Jekyll to Pelican.
+
+Story time!
+===========
+
+It wasn’t just a plain conversion, though.  I also added a lot of my old stories, previously
+published on Medium (i will delete that account within a few days, so it doesn’t worth linking.)
+These stories are published with their original date (i wrote most of theme long before Medium
+existed).
+
+Why?
+====
+
+I left GitHub Pages for about a year or so now to host my site for myself.  (Remember when i `said
+goodbye to DigitalOcean
+<{filename}../blog/2015-04-25-good-bye-digital-ocean-hello-again-github.rst>`_?  Well, it seems
+this goodbye was not forever…)  My reasons were mainly about privacy, and the urge to do it
+myself; i probably won’t overcome this latter one, like, ever.  I want to make my hands dirty with
+stuff like this.  I also believe in the web as the web, not as a centralised… thing.
+
+Another reason was that i want to host this site not only on HTTP, but also on `DAT
+<dat://gergely.polonkai.eu>`_ (there’s also a `hash link <dat://f261>`_) and IPFS.  It’s not impossible with
+Jekyll, it’s just easier for me because of Python.
+
+And thus, we arrive to my final reason.  Pelican may not have as many users as Jekyll does, but
+it’s written in Python.  It’s a big plus for me as i work with Python every day.  It’s easy for me
+to hack on the engine itself if i have to (and i had to several times during the migration).
+
+Where did the comments go?
+==========================
+
+My site is a static site.  It means there’s no dynamic web engine behind it (it wouldn’n actually
+work on DAT/IPFS, would it?)  It is so for a long while now.  As such, i used Disqus for comments
+but, again for privacy reasons, i have removed it completely.  Also, i didn’t have comments
+anyway.
+
+What happened with the looks?
+=============================
+
+I didn’t convert my previous theme to Pelican format.  I might, in the future, as i’m not
+completely happy with the new layout.  I like the new fonts, though, so maybe it will be a healthy
+merger of the two.  The reason for not doing it instantly is because the old site relied heavily
+on external JavaScript and CSS files (like Bootstrap) which doesn’t work well with Dat and IPFS
+(yes, most Dat browsers are capable of opening them from HTTP, but then what’s the point of the
+whole conversion?)  Now anyone can browse my site without an internet connection, and enjoy it in
+its full glory.
+
+What is left?
+=============
+
+I still want to do a lot of CSS tweaks, maybe converting the whole CSS part to SCSS/SASS (i
+suspect the built-in theme of Pelican was written in SASS, i just need to find the source).
+Nothing big, just to clean up the code.
+
+I also want to make sure my site renders well with screen readers.  I don’t have much content, but
+i want it to make accessible for everyone.  So keep an eye on the site, it might change soon!