Finally, after a year of almost no activity, I have updated my blog with new software. I used to run Wordpress for the past seven or so years but finally decided it was time for something new. As of today, I am running on Pelican, a Python-based static website generator. This means good-bye to the php-based dynamic colution. I hope this will give this blog some more security. Comments will be via Disqus for the moment, for want of a better alternative. I still plan to eventually migrate to completely static comments, but for now Disqus will do.
Also, you might notice that the theme I use looks a lot like the one from Octopress. This is because I use the fabolous Pelican Octopress theme by Maurizio Sambati. I don’t use Octopress itself at the moment because I still have a hard time working with Ruby on Windows. Also, Pelican easily supports reStructured Text out of the box which I do in fact like better than Markdown (and have used it more often).
My new setup includes some more nifty technical details.
For ease of deployment, I have devised a workflow that is based on RhodeCode and Jenkins. I have setup a RhodeCode instance on my local server where I store the source to my blog. At the moment I use Mercurial to manage the versions. Furthermore, I have a Jenkins installation on the same server that pulls from the RhodeCode instance, builds the blog contents and publishes the result here afterwards. To avoid frequently polling on Mercurial, I have also installed a trigger in Mercurial (or RhodeCode respectively) that triggers the rebuild of the blog. The following figure gives an overview.
Now, this might seem like a bit of overhead on the setup side, but I had a lot of fun automating it this way. Technically I could just as well pusblish the blog from my personal PC everytime, but I found that to be an unworthy alternative ;)
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