Rebuild Pelican Source

Overview

I had a couple of issues with my computer that I was using to work on this website. Technically this shouldn’t be that big of a deal as my code is on GitHub, so it should just be creating a virtual environment and running make html. However my documentation wasn’t quite up to scratch.

Git Submodules

I don’t use submodules much and had to look up the documentation to get pelican-plugins and pelican-themes updated after git clone. I had to do a git submodule init and git submodule update which mostly worked. I then had to do git clone https://github.com/Pelican-Elegant/elegant in pelican-themes/elegant as that folder was empty which again wasn’t documented.

Creating Virtual Environment

I use pyenv to create virtual environments and to download various versions of Python. My documentation doesn’t mention which version of Python to use. Initially I thought I could just use 3.12 and update the packages. However, Pelican Jupyter has been archived in 2023. I had to guess the version by looking at when I created this website (3.9). After that I was able to get it to work.

Lack of Documentation

Most of the problems above are related to a lack of documentation. I did have a simple README.md that wasn’t updated and didn’t include some of the tooling that I updated to make my life easier to post. I ended up looking through my commits and reading some of the scripts before I remembered the process to updating my website.

Next Steps

While I got the website ready to start adding articles, I not sure that this setup is sustainable. The main issues is that I would need to update to the latest Python, with updated packages. I would then have to replace Pelican Jupyter since it is no longer being updated.

I did do some research to switch to Hugo since it appears much more activity (release last week) than Pelican (release last year). I still haven’t decided what I will do and may just stay with Pelican for now. I need to sit down and determine what I want going forward beyond:

• Optional dark theme.
• Quicker method to write and publish (probably using GitHub Actions).
• Less dependencies.