1. Pelican, a Python-based static blog site generator. a. Pelican relies on Jinja2, a templating language for Python. It allows you to insert code into parts of your HTML page so you can call scripts to piece your page together.
2. Virtualenv sandboxes Python dependencies (pip installs packages globally, meaning you can't have multiple versions of the same library. If you have an old project that uses library v1 and you're starting a project that uses library v8, calling pip might break your old project).
3. ghp-import. After committing in this repository, it pushes to my Github static site repository.

Just refer to the documentation.

1. Install Python 3.3 or higher.
2. Run pip install virtualenv to install virtualenv so you can sandbox your libraries.
3. Do not immediately run virtualenv ~/virtualenvs/pelican. You have to change your directory to where you want the virtual environments to live in.

If I run virtualenv ~/virtualenvs/pelican in C:/Users/Charlie/Documents, it would actually create the fucking folder C:/Users/Charlie/Documents/~/virtualenvs/pelican instead of doing C:/Users/Charlie/virtualenvs/pelican.

4. Run virtualenv {your virtualenvs directory}/{name of your sandbox} to create the new sandbox. For example, my virtualenvs directory on Oreo is C:/python-virtualenvs and I wany my sandbox to be called pelican, so I would run virtualenv C:/python-virtualenvs/pelican.
5. Do not run source /virtualenvs/pelican/bin/activate to set the current terminal session to the sandbox. First, Windows doesn't recognize the source command. Second, the script is not in /bin. It's in /Scripts. Just run {your virtualenvs directory}/{name of your sandbox}/Scripts/activate instead.
6. pip install pelican to install pelican to the current sandbox.
7. pip install Markdown to install Markdown support for pelican.
8. pip install ghp-import to install ghp-import.

1. Run C:/python-virtualenvs/pelican/Scripts/activate to set the current session to this blog's sandbox.
2. Do your shit.

• Go to themes to restyle the site, change the scripts, etc.
  • themes/{theme}/templates includes all the HTML templates that will be filled.
  • themes/{theme}/static includes the CSS/JS.
  • Right now my theme is notmyidea.
• Go to content to change the actual content. Just create a Markdown file. Look at existing Markdown files to see the required metadata.
• output is where pelican outputs to.

# You *must* give pelican the directory of the CONTENT FOLDER, not the directory of the project, or it will fucking break
# For example, running `pelican` in your root directory fails, but running
pelican content
# works
# (it seems like by default it sets the output dir and the pelicanconf dir)

# I added a post-commit git hook that runs ghp-import, so after committing...
git commit -am "changes ya"
# it mmediately updates the main repo

1. If you want to delete a blog post, you have to delete the old HTML in the output folder.
2. You can create arbitrary metadata for files. They have to follow the same format as the predefined ones.
3. The variables in Jinja2 are lower cased:

For example, if you have the metadata CoverImage, you have to access it as article.coverimage. Spaces do not work, so I use Cover_Image instead (which I access as article.cover_image)

4. By default, the articles are sorted by date (with most recent being first). I rely on that for the main page.