10 ms·

Pelican static site generator 4.5

193 points by dragonsh 6y ago

ahelwer 6y ago
My blog (ahelwer.ca) uses Hugo hosted on gitlab pages; I notice that privacy badger flags two trackers on it, cloudflare CDN and google fonts. I'm assuming gfonts is because the Hugo theme I'm using uses a google-provided font and cloudflare CDN is there because it's automatically added by gitlab or something; anyone know how you can create a completely tracker-free experience? Do you basically have to stand up your own webserver on a cloud provider (or at home)? I guess without cloudflare or some other CDN you'd also have to hope your server can handle serving all the traffic directly. Or would a different static site generator like pelican help?
- detritus 6y ago
  Your posts seems to highlight why I'm wary about these extractable site generator things - it appears that people much smarter than I use them out of the box but don't really peer into that box, so end up with queries like yours. Whereas dumb people like me hand code a site and keep small chunks of code or 'boot strap' type folders where we can re-use old assets quickly and with the knowledge of exactly what's in them. I don't use Hugo, etc, but it seems odd to me that it's not abundantly clear how to nix CDN and Google asset references from the site generation code.
  - ahelwer 6y ago
    No disrespect intended, I've just never enjoyed all the tinkering that comes with managing this stuff myself. I just want to write & publish my posts somehow; used to use medium but then they added all these popups and annoying things, so I switched to Hugo. Now, it might be a good stepping stone to eventually just setting this all up myself, since I've been frustrated with the limitations of markdown & hugo shortcodes and occasionally just want to write things in HTML (yes I know you can write HTML in hugo markdown pages). But I never would get to that stage straight from hosted blogs like medium, so it is good that static site generators exist I think.
    - detritus 6y ago
      No disrespect assumed! :) tbh, when I see people using things like Hugo, i tend to assume they're on a part of the web dev spectrum that is equal-to or further-along than mine. This my failing. I made assumptions about your situation. I just tend to assume that people default to things like Wordpress when they need to exist in that hinterland between publication and bother. Perhaps I need to look into these things a bit more!
  - zerkten 6y ago
    > I don't use Hugo, etc, but it seems odd to me that it's not abundantly clear how to nix CDN and Google asset references from the site generation code. All static site generators do is take a bunch of inputs (markdown files, templates, config, images, etc.) and process them to output a directory of HTML and assets. It's usually trivial to do a search on the input side and identify the source of the problem code. Commenting it out and reprocessing results in it being removed. You only run into complications when there is some odd dependency between the static site generator and the inputs. Generally, it'll delegate everything to the templates it uses (good separation of concerns), but sometimes there is a weird config option, or convention you are supposed to use.
  - paultopia 6y ago
    Static site generators are really useful for ongoing projects with new pages being added all the time. I hand-roll my discrete "here's a page for a thing" sites, and use SSGs for things like blogs, classes, etc., stuff where I might just decide to add a page when I'm sitting on a train, and would like to just be able to type it out in markdown on my phone, push a commit, and have it appear.
- TacoSteemers 6y ago
  You could get your own hosting, and not use Cloudflare. You could then host the font on your own site. My site doesn't load any files from a different domain since I removed the Twitter share button javascript[0], except for one page. I moved the mailchimp signup to a separate page to isolate their JS code to just that page. [0] https://tacosteemers.com/articles/2020-08-30-twitter-share-button-does-not-need-javascript.html https://tacosteemers.com/articles/2020-08-30-twitter-share-b...
  - TacoSteemers 6y ago
    To add to my answer: If we depend on other people's hosting and themes then we just kind of have to accept what they offer. But getting our own hosting doesn't have to be difficult. There are many cheap providers that give sftp access, for example. Pelican comes with a script for uploading to sftp.
  - oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
    > You could then host the font on your own site. Only if you have a licence for it — font licences are typically prohibitively expensive for individuals' use.
    - detaro 6y ago
      All Google Fonts are open-source.
      - oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
        That's ... interesting. I must admit, I think somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that, but I'm so used to font services requiring to be used remotely, I hadn't even really considered that. So there's absolutely no breach of any kind of law or terms if you host them locally? That could be a game-changer, thanks!
        onion2k 6y ago
        So there's absolutely no breach of any kind of law or terms if you host them locally? Open source doesn't necessarily mean free to use for whatever you want. Which licence a font on Google Fonts uses varies - common ones are Apache and Open Font Licence, but you should check the licence file in any font pack you download.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  I quick look on what happens, it would seem cloudflare is used to load katex.js You may be able to disable this in the theme config if you don't use it.
  - ahelwer 6y ago
    Ahhh thank you, looks like that's used to render MathML, which I do use. Perhaps I can add katex.js to the git repo and serve it from wherever it is gitlab hosts their websites.
    - vladvasiliu 6y ago
      I'm no hugo expert, but that's likely possible. After all, the JS files are static content. You can probably modify the theme's template to load the js from the origin. I guess the whole point of using cloudflare as the cdn is so that people can reuse this from cache.
      - ahelwer 6y ago
        That's an interesting trade-off. I guess static sites are small enough that downloading an extra script wouldn't be terrible, by modern heavyweight website standards. Still, maybe I should look into what cloudflare CDN actually does with its data.
    - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
      I use pelican-katex plugin to render math once during website generation, and then not have to load the katex.js file at all. Only a katex.css file and fonts loaded from my own server. https://github.com/cqql/pelican-katex https://github.com/cqql/pelican-katex
- merlinscholz 6y ago
  I host my blog on netlify.com, works great and automatically builds on git push. Instead of cloudflare CDN they use their own CDN network.
  - onion2k 6y ago
    I also use Netlify. On the free tier of Netlify a site is deployed to 6 points on the Netlify Edge CDN (Frankfurt, Singapore, San Francisco, New York, Sao Paolo, Sydney, Moscow as of August this year, but it might have changed). On the free tier of Cloudflare a site is deployed to 194 locations. That can knock a couple of hundred ms off of a page load time. It might be worthwhile if you need something to be especially fast. That said, Cloudflare is much more of a hassle to set up. Netlify is ludicrously easy. That's one of the many things I like about it.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      Why is Cloudflare more of a hassle? Point your nameservers to them, done. I use Cloudflare in front of Netlify.
    - Kye 6y ago
      Step 1: set up on Netlify Step 2: add the domain on Cloudflare and let it grab the DNS entries Netlify made
- oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
  The google font issue is obviously down to you, but GitHub pages doesn't add anything that gets flagged by Privacy Badger.
- otekeng 6y ago
  Gitlab pages doesn't inherently use trackers - See link below showing Privacy Badger for my page that's also built with Hugo. Your trackers probably come from your Hugo template, I had to edit the template to remove them. https://otekeng.gitlab.io/privacy_badger.PNG https://otekeng.gitlab.io/privacy_badger.PNG
- ficklepickle 6y ago
  You should add a CNAME record for the www subdomain. As it stands now, appending "www." results in a server not found. Browsers append that automatically sometimes. The cloudflare CDN is there because your theme includes "auto-render.min.js" and "katex.min.js" from cdnjs.cloudflare.com. They are in script tags in your homepage HTML. You can verify this with: > curl -L ahelwer.ca | grep 'auto-render.min.js' You can check my domain if you want an example of a CNAME record: > dig CNAME www.jeremypoole.ca I am also using Hugo, I modified a theme called "coder". As far as avoiding trackers, it would depend on what you mean by tracker. In your case, the external requests are for fonts and a couple of JavaScript dependencies. You could easily host those yourself instead of using the CDN, and then there would be no third-party HTTP requests. As a fellow .ca HNer, I would gladly help you out. Feel free to hit me up.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    GitLab Pages also apparently needs a TXT verification record for the subdomain as well, otherwise it'll serve a 401. (GitHub Pages does not seem to require this.)
- xconverge 6y ago
  Thanks for this question, it allowed me to tune some of the cloudflare optimizations I didn't need (Rocket Loader) and remove the dependency for the script pull and thus the tracking flag with privacy badger! I hadn't even thought to check if my own site met my own personal bar/criteria for trackers and ads!
jonathanberger 6y ago
Incase it benefits others, I did a brief survey of static site generators and while Pelican looked great it had more functionality than I needed. I ended up using staticjinja instead. And after sticking with it for over a year now, I'd still recommend it if Pelican features like RSS feeds and code syntax highlighting seem like overkill for your project.
- arusahni 6y ago
  Did your survey include Nikola [1]? It seems like the most direct competitor to Pelican, and I'd be curious to see how they stack up against each other. 1: https://getnikola.com/ https://getnikola.com/
- throw0101a 6y ago
  Is there any reason to not have or generate RSS/Atom feeds?
- BeetleB 6y ago
  Pelican has a lot of features, but it's not as if you need to use all those features. If you want a plain site, it's trivial to use.
nottorp 6y ago
I’d very much like to commend whoever posted this for saying what Pelican is right in the gorram title!
- pratio 6y ago
  Thank you for the firefly reference
- PostThisTooFast 6y ago
  AMEN. It's pretty tiresome to see the one post after another about yet another relatively obscure project or technology by name only, as if everyone is supposed to know what it is.
dragonsh 6y ago
Pelican is an underdog among static site generators but still has a very simple mental model [1] of readers, writers and generators.So it becomes easy to extend and work with. Not sure why it’s not as popular, but after working with Jekyll, Hugo and Nikola Pelican seems better designed with decent code structure. From the documentation: “What Pelican does is take a list of files and process them into some sort of output. Usually, the input files are reStructuredText and Markdown files, and the output is a blog, but both input and output can be anything you want.” [1] https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#overall-structure https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#overall...
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  Sounds like make(1).
  - makapuf 6y ago
    make would be a nice companion, but it does not process files, it handles the order of files processingf (indeed, static sites generators and make go together quite nicely)
  - sabalaba 6y ago
    Yea I made a static site generator with about 50 lines of code using make and pandoc: http://stephenbalaban.com/static-site-generation-in-50-lines-of-code/ http://stephenbalaban.com/static-site-generation-in-50-lines... Most of the work is just creating the index.
  - dflock 6y ago
    Pelican does in fact ship with a makefile for running tasks.
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  Having worked with both Pelican and Jekyll, I couldn't agree more. Pelican is simple and easy to install, compared to what I had to go through with Jekyll.
spapas82 6y ago
For anybody that wants to start with pelican I had written a tutorial post about it at https://spapas.github.io/2013/10/07/pelican-static-windows/ https://spapas.github.io/2013/10/07/pelican-static-windows/. Also that blog is made with pelican and hosted with GitHub pages so you can see some of pelican's features. I'm using it for more than 7 years and am really happy with it (the fact that I am familiar with python and can debug some problems myself definitely helps)
StavrosK 6y ago
Has anyone compared Pelican to Zola? I use Lektor myself (and love it), but I sometimes find myself pining for something fast and self-contained.
- asicsp 6y ago
  Zola [0] has a comparison table between Zola, Cobalt, Hugo and Pelican. I tried out Zola because I saw somewhere that it was single binary (had heard of Hugo, but didn't know it was single binary). I moved my blog from Jekyll to Zola as I found a theme I liked. [0] https://github.com/getzola/zola https://github.com/getzola/zola
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Ah, that's useful, thank you. I'm also looking for some personal experience, because, for example, while Hugo looks great on paper, its data model and template language frustrated me to no end the one time I tried to make something with it.
- tl 6y ago
  Zola is fast and simple, but there is a hard upper bound on what it can do, and the author has no desire to change this. One example is requests to support PostCSS instead of SASS. Zola's author doesn't want a dependency larger than the entire application. I'm currently using Zola + python/js scripts to do things Zola can't and considering a move to something like Pelican.
  - Keats 6y ago
    > One example is requests to support PostCSS instead of SASS In practice to use PostCSS, you need npm to install plugins, and maybe a `postcss.config.js`, so there are no advantages of having that PostCSS call in Zola's `config.toml` or as a script in `package.json`. I don't really see how others SSG would handle that. Hugo just shells out a command to `postcss-cli` that needs to be installed (https://gohugo.io/hugo-pipes/postcss/ https://gohugo.io/hugo-pipes/postcss/), along with whatever plugins you are using. It's not really something "built-in".
FrontAid 6y ago
Does Pelican allow to use external content files that are not written in Markdown? I'd like to load content from a JSON file to enrich certain pages or even create whole site structures dynamically. I couldn't find anything related in neither the documentation nor the plugin repo. edit: It seems one might be able to write a custom reader for that according to https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#how-to-implement-a-new-reader https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#how-to-...
- dragonsh 6y ago
  Use the reader plugin pelican-json-reader [1] and modify for your own use case. [1] https://github.com/jessaustin/pelican-json-reader https://github.com/jessaustin/pelican-json-reader
  - FrontAid 6y ago
    Thanks. It seems that Pelican is very restrictive in what content structures it allows. Do you know whether it can work with arbitrary JSON structures somehow?
    - dragonsh 6y ago
      In my other post I put a link [1] to pelican internal model. You can customise it the way you want as it’s a simple model. It’s not restrictive. You can write a plug-in to do what you would like and it’s easy with version 4.5. [1] https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#overall-structure https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#overall...
    - mixmastamyk 6y ago
      Write a short python or javascript to do what you want and put it in a build script.
japhyr 6y ago
I have used Jekyll for years on a GitHub pages site. I like working with Jekyll overall, but the site has grown to a moderate size and now it takes about 8 seconds to render changes locally. When I started a new personal site last year I went with Hugo because one of its main selling points is speed. Can anyone share how Pelican's rendering speed compares to Jekyll and Hugo?
- tuananh 6y ago
  based on the language alone, hugo is probably winner here.
- spapas82 6y ago
  Haven't used the others but pelican is rather slow. For be blog, it takes a couple of minutes to generate the site and around 10 seconds to render any changes. That's my main complaint of pelican.
- philshem 6y ago
  I migrated from Pelican to Hugo. Build/render times are a fraction with Hugo. But my main issue with Pelican was git submodules for plugins. With Hugo I just find a theme I like and then everything works. For the record, I use Python daily and I’ve never written a line in Go. But with these static site generators, most people won’t ever need to look under the hood. Edit: I see the main feature for Pelican 4.5 is namespace plugins, which should prevent some headaches.
- seanwilson 6y ago
  I tested Hugo a few days ago on 10K posts and it took 40 seconds for a full build. It builds in a fraction of second if you've only got a few pages. I don't love the template language but aside from basic template features like if/then/else/not/forEach I don't really find I need to do much fancy when jumping between different static site generators or even WordPress. Hugo's speed wins out for me a lot of the time.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  Pelican is slow. If 8 seconds bothers you, you won't be happy with Pelican. I think there are settings where it kind of detects what has changed and only renders that output to speed it up, but I've not experimented with it. I rarely make changes to my site, so waiting is not a concern for me.
g8oz 6y ago
A comprehensive list of static site generators can be found at https://www.staticgen.com/ https://www.staticgen.com/
- superkuh 6y ago
  It's a good list, but the best static site generator is a human person writing .html files. All this static site generator stuff is unneeded complexity for those that enjoy complexity.
  - TacoSteemers 6y ago
    > All this static site generator stuff is unneeded complexity for those that enjoy complexity. I don't think so, and will give a few examples why. I like Pelican because when working manually it is easy to mess up some HTML tags, forget to update an article listing, category listing, or RSS feed. Creating and adding PlantUML diagrams is more work manually than it is when integrated with Pelican. Pelican even tells me when I accidentally mess up an internal link. It simplifies my publishing such that I actually have enough time and energy to do so, and in that sense it is not unneeded complexity.
    - superkuh 6y ago
      These static site generators are mostly operating under the same conceptual model of what a website is and that's both very restrictive and brings in requirements that aren't actually requirements. Posts and categories and date dependent lists. Blogs aren't the only way. You can just make pages. You don't have to 'publish' and have every single page be exactly like every other page on your site. Maybe they should be called static blog generators instead.
      - TacoSteemers 6y ago
        Pelican does have support for random pages. If also doesn't stop you from copying your own pages to the output directory after generating. In that sense it is more of a markdown or RST to HTML converter. It has great blog support but doesn't exclude other uses, such as documentation generation. PS. I liked your post about the returned parrot.
liquid153 6y ago
I think Jekyll is only popular since its the only official static site generator supported by github pages
jeromenerf 6y ago
Here comes the "I use org mode BTW" comment. When it comes to my personal websites, I use org mode, because publishing is actually an exception in my day to day life. I use emacs for org mode only, but I use it all day long to keep notes, track todos, document projects, write prose and messages. Sometimes, I think something is worth publishing, so I mark it with the appropriate tags, run the publish command and let syncthing update the websites. I have used hugo for a dozen significant project and I like it. I have chosen hugo over the alternatives because I prefer go to javascript, ruby and python in almost all possible regards. I even teach classes to journalism students with hugo and gitlab. Static site generators are great for "projects" but as a individual willing to share some mildly interesting content as a side effect of his daily activities, I still consider them too much work and maintenance.
- clankyclanker 6y ago
  Have you considered org-mode to markdown and ikiwiki? That seems to be the simplest single-user publishing system I’m aware of.
  - jeromenerf 6y ago
    No, I have not. I have chosen org for its numerous features and publishing is just one of them.
jshen 6y ago
I use Pelican, and am happy with it, but I wish it had better options for simple templates/themes.
crossroadsguy 6y ago
I have tried couple of them. Then I realised all I needed was some HTML, few lines of CSS, and zero JS and definitely no static site generator. I am not saying no one else needs it. However, the majority of sites I've seen that are generated via static site generators are using static site generators just because they can.
- wishinghand 6y ago
  If it's more than two pages I'd use one just because I hate copy-pasting stuff for headers/footers. I know vanilla PHP allows templating but static hosts can't run that. If only HTML allowed for importing fragments.
  - jccooper 6y ago
    Something like staticjinja makes simple edit-side templating quite reasonable. It even does live rebuilding. Nice simple lightweight way to do static site building if you don't need all the CMS-type stuff. https://github.com/staticjinja/staticjinja https://github.com/staticjinja/staticjinja
  - tasogare 6y ago
    You can use PHP while hosting in static if you generate all the pages upfront. This is what I do for my website (3 pages, soon 4, for i18n). In addition of i18n, it allows me to generate most of the tedious context by factoring them in functions. I build with a 4 lines script, and upload with another.
  - freetonik 6y ago
    I found Sergey[0] a great solution for this one particular problem. [0]. https://sergey.cool/ https://sergey.cool/
tardismechanic 6y ago
FWIW, a leaderboard of SSGs: https://www.staticgen.com/ https://www.staticgen.com/
- MisterPea 6y ago
  Why is this space so bloated?
  - tobr 6y ago
    Probably because of bike shedding. It’s not exactly hard to write some simple code from scratch to read the input files, pass them through various parsers, templates, processors, and write out the result. The heavy lifting is done by the processors, which you typically don’t need to write yourself. So an SSG is an attempt to put an abstraction on top of this, which may have some benefits but also introduces a lot of relatively uncalled for complexity and fragile dependency chains. And because the nature of the task is very heterogeneous, the API will either have to be very allowing (and less useful as an abstraction) or impose various assumptions and restrictions on how you do things. That’s very fertile ground for a lot of people to want to create their own take on it as they run into limitations of existing SSGs.
    - divbzero 6y ago
      > It’s not exactly hard to write some simple code from scratch to read the input files, pass them through various parsers, templates, processors, and write out the result. I think this is it exactly. You could roll your own if you wanted and package it as a library without too much difficulty and I haven’t found compelling reasons why any one static generator is superior to another. It seems to come down to which generators are supported by default by your hosting service, or your language of preference if you’re building custom extensions.
    - mturmon 6y ago
      100% agree. Thus, the real question is not: "Why are there so many static site generators?" It is rather: "Why isn't there a static site generator generator?"
GekkePrutser 6y ago
I'd never heard of Pelican but I have to say their site is doing an really bad job at explaining what it does and how :) I'd expect some screenshots and some points. All I learned from reading it is that it supports markdown but not really what kind of site it's for (e.g. blogs like wordpress etc). I'm looking for a static generator to make a blog (static mainly for security and because I don't want to do anything complex anyway). But not sure if this will suffice.
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  That's a dev-blog, try: https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/ https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/ The site itself is sort of the screenshot.
auraham 6y ago
I am a Pelican user and I love it. My blog is made with Pelican. I also tried Hugo, Gatsby, and Jekyll, but they require much more orchestation than Pelican. There are two areas that can be improved: documentation and themes. I got difficulties trying to customize my blog (syntax highlighting, integration with jupyter notebooks, latex support, and so on). Most of the time the answers were in another blog, not in the docs. Also, the default theme is not attractive for new users. That prevents them to even give it a try.

193 points by dragonsh 6y ago

My blog (ahelwer.ca) uses Hugo hosted on gitlab pages; I notice that privacy badger flags two trackers on it, cloudflare CDN and google fonts. I'm assuming gfonts is because the Hugo theme I'm using uses a google-provided font and cloudflare CDN is there because it's automatically added by gitlab or something; anyone know how you can create a completely tracker-free experience? Do you basically have to stand up your own webserver on a cloud provider (or at home)? I guess without cloudflare or some other CDN you'd also have to hope your server can handle serving all the traffic directly. Or would a different static site generator like pelican help?

detritus 6y ago
Your posts seems to highlight why I'm wary about these extractable site generator things - it appears that people much smarter than I use them out of the box but don't really peer into that box, so end up with queries like yours. Whereas dumb people like me hand code a site and keep small chunks of code or 'boot strap' type folders where we can re-use old assets quickly and with the knowledge of exactly what's in them. I don't use Hugo, etc, but it seems odd to me that it's not abundantly clear how to nix CDN and Google asset references from the site generation code.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  No disrespect intended, I've just never enjoyed all the tinkering that comes with managing this stuff myself. I just want to write & publish my posts somehow; used to use medium but then they added all these popups and annoying things, so I switched to Hugo. Now, it might be a good stepping stone to eventually just setting this all up myself, since I've been frustrated with the limitations of markdown & hugo shortcodes and occasionally just want to write things in HTML (yes I know you can write HTML in hugo markdown pages). But I never would get to that stage straight from hosted blogs like medium, so it is good that static site generators exist I think.
  - detritus 6y ago
    No disrespect assumed! :) tbh, when I see people using things like Hugo, i tend to assume they're on a part of the web dev spectrum that is equal-to or further-along than mine. This my failing. I made assumptions about your situation. I just tend to assume that people default to things like Wordpress when they need to exist in that hinterland between publication and bother. Perhaps I need to look into these things a bit more!
- zerkten 6y ago
  > I don't use Hugo, etc, but it seems odd to me that it's not abundantly clear how to nix CDN and Google asset references from the site generation code. All static site generators do is take a bunch of inputs (markdown files, templates, config, images, etc.) and process them to output a directory of HTML and assets. It's usually trivial to do a search on the input side and identify the source of the problem code. Commenting it out and reprocessing results in it being removed. You only run into complications when there is some odd dependency between the static site generator and the inputs. Generally, it'll delegate everything to the templates it uses (good separation of concerns), but sometimes there is a weird config option, or convention you are supposed to use.
- paultopia 6y ago
  Static site generators are really useful for ongoing projects with new pages being added all the time. I hand-roll my discrete "here's a page for a thing" sites, and use SSGs for things like blogs, classes, etc., stuff where I might just decide to add a page when I'm sitting on a train, and would like to just be able to type it out in markdown on my phone, push a commit, and have it appear.
TacoSteemers 6y ago
You could get your own hosting, and not use Cloudflare. You could then host the font on your own site. My site doesn't load any files from a different domain since I removed the Twitter share button javascript[0], except for one page. I moved the mailchimp signup to a separate page to isolate their JS code to just that page. [0] https://tacosteemers.com/articles/2020-08-30-twitter-share-button-does-not-need-javascript.html https://tacosteemers.com/articles/2020-08-30-twitter-share-b...
- TacoSteemers 6y ago
  To add to my answer: If we depend on other people's hosting and themes then we just kind of have to accept what they offer. But getting our own hosting doesn't have to be difficult. There are many cheap providers that give sftp access, for example. Pelican comes with a script for uploading to sftp.
- oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
  > You could then host the font on your own site. Only if you have a licence for it — font licences are typically prohibitively expensive for individuals' use.
  - detaro 6y ago
    All Google Fonts are open-source.
    - oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
      That's ... interesting. I must admit, I think somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that, but I'm so used to font services requiring to be used remotely, I hadn't even really considered that. So there's absolutely no breach of any kind of law or terms if you host them locally? That could be a game-changer, thanks!
      - onion2k 6y ago
        So there's absolutely no breach of any kind of law or terms if you host them locally? Open source doesn't necessarily mean free to use for whatever you want. Which licence a font on Google Fonts uses varies - common ones are Apache and Open Font Licence, but you should check the licence file in any font pack you download.
vladvasiliu 6y ago
I quick look on what happens, it would seem cloudflare is used to load katex.js You may be able to disable this in the theme config if you don't use it.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  Ahhh thank you, looks like that's used to render MathML, which I do use. Perhaps I can add katex.js to the git repo and serve it from wherever it is gitlab hosts their websites.
  - vladvasiliu 6y ago
    I'm no hugo expert, but that's likely possible. After all, the JS files are static content. You can probably modify the theme's template to load the js from the origin. I guess the whole point of using cloudflare as the cdn is so that people can reuse this from cache.
    - ahelwer 6y ago
      That's an interesting trade-off. I guess static sites are small enough that downloading an extra script wouldn't be terrible, by modern heavyweight website standards. Still, maybe I should look into what cloudflare CDN actually does with its data.
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    I use pelican-katex plugin to render math once during website generation, and then not have to load the katex.js file at all. Only a katex.css file and fonts loaded from my own server. https://github.com/cqql/pelican-katex https://github.com/cqql/pelican-katex
merlinscholz 6y ago
I host my blog on netlify.com, works great and automatically builds on git push. Instead of cloudflare CDN they use their own CDN network.
- onion2k 6y ago
  I also use Netlify. On the free tier of Netlify a site is deployed to 6 points on the Netlify Edge CDN (Frankfurt, Singapore, San Francisco, New York, Sao Paolo, Sydney, Moscow as of August this year, but it might have changed). On the free tier of Cloudflare a site is deployed to 194 locations. That can knock a couple of hundred ms off of a page load time. It might be worthwhile if you need something to be especially fast. That said, Cloudflare is much more of a hassle to set up. Netlify is ludicrously easy. That's one of the many things I like about it.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Why is Cloudflare more of a hassle? Point your nameservers to them, done. I use Cloudflare in front of Netlify.
  - Kye 6y ago
    Step 1: set up on Netlify Step 2: add the domain on Cloudflare and let it grab the DNS entries Netlify made
oneeyedpigeon 6y ago
The google font issue is obviously down to you, but GitHub pages doesn't add anything that gets flagged by Privacy Badger.
otekeng 6y ago
Gitlab pages doesn't inherently use trackers - See link below showing Privacy Badger for my page that's also built with Hugo. Your trackers probably come from your Hugo template, I had to edit the template to remove them. https://otekeng.gitlab.io/privacy_badger.PNG https://otekeng.gitlab.io/privacy_badger.PNG
ficklepickle 6y ago
You should add a CNAME record for the www subdomain. As it stands now, appending "www." results in a server not found. Browsers append that automatically sometimes. The cloudflare CDN is there because your theme includes "auto-render.min.js" and "katex.min.js" from cdnjs.cloudflare.com. They are in script tags in your homepage HTML. You can verify this with: > curl -L ahelwer.ca | grep 'auto-render.min.js' You can check my domain if you want an example of a CNAME record: > dig CNAME www.jeremypoole.ca I am also using Hugo, I modified a theme called "coder". As far as avoiding trackers, it would depend on what you mean by tracker. In your case, the external requests are for fonts and a couple of JavaScript dependencies. You could easily host those yourself instead of using the CDN, and then there would be no third-party HTTP requests. As a fellow .ca HNer, I would gladly help you out. Feel free to hit me up.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  GitLab Pages also apparently needs a TXT verification record for the subdomain as well, otherwise it'll serve a 401. (GitHub Pages does not seem to require this.)
xconverge 6y ago
Thanks for this question, it allowed me to tune some of the cloudflare optimizations I didn't need (Rocket Loader) and remove the dependency for the script pull and thus the tracking flag with privacy badger! I hadn't even thought to check if my own site met my own personal bar/criteria for trackers and ads!

jonathanberger 6y ago

Incase it benefits others, I did a brief survey of static site generators and while Pelican looked great it had more functionality than I needed. I ended up using staticjinja instead. And after sticking with it for over a year now, I'd still recommend it if Pelican features like RSS feeds and code syntax highlighting seem like overkill for your project.

arusahni 6y ago
Did your survey include Nikola [1]? It seems like the most direct competitor to Pelican, and I'd be curious to see how they stack up against each other. 1: https://getnikola.com/ https://getnikola.com/
throw0101a 6y ago
Is there any reason to not have or generate RSS/Atom feeds?
BeetleB 6y ago
Pelican has a lot of features, but it's not as if you need to use all those features. If you want a plain site, it's trivial to use.

nottorp 6y ago

I’d very much like to commend whoever posted this for saying what Pelican is right in the gorram title!

pratio 6y ago
Thank you for the firefly reference
PostThisTooFast 6y ago
AMEN. It's pretty tiresome to see the one post after another about yet another relatively obscure project or technology by name only, as if everyone is supposed to know what it is.

dragonsh 6y ago

Pelican is an underdog among static site generators but still has a very simple mental model [1] of readers, writers and generators.So it becomes easy to extend and work with. Not sure why it’s not as popular, but after working with Jekyll, Hugo and Nikola Pelican seems better designed with decent code structure. From the documentation: “What Pelican does is take a list of files and process them into some sort of output. Usually, the input files are reStructuredText and Markdown files, and the output is a blog, but both input and output can be anything you want.” [1] https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#overall-structure https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#overall...

formerly_proven 6y ago
Sounds like make(1).
- makapuf 6y ago
  make would be a nice companion, but it does not process files, it handles the order of files processingf (indeed, static sites generators and make go together quite nicely)
- sabalaba 6y ago
  Yea I made a static site generator with about 50 lines of code using make and pandoc: http://stephenbalaban.com/static-site-generation-in-50-lines-of-code/ http://stephenbalaban.com/static-site-generation-in-50-lines... Most of the work is just creating the index.
- dflock 6y ago
  Pelican does in fact ship with a makefile for running tasks.
TonyTrapp 6y ago
Having worked with both Pelican and Jekyll, I couldn't agree more. Pelican is simple and easy to install, compared to what I had to go through with Jekyll.

spapas82 6y ago

For anybody that wants to start with pelican I had written a tutorial post about it at https://spapas.github.io/2013/10/07/pelican-static-windows/ https://spapas.github.io/2013/10/07/pelican-static-windows/. Also that blog is made with pelican and hosted with GitHub pages so you can see some of pelican's features. I'm using it for more than 7 years and am really happy with it (the fact that I am familiar with python and can debug some problems myself definitely helps)

StavrosK 6y ago

Has anyone compared Pelican to Zola? I use Lektor myself (and love it), but I sometimes find myself pining for something fast and self-contained.

asicsp 6y ago
Zola [0] has a comparison table between Zola, Cobalt, Hugo and Pelican. I tried out Zola because I saw somewhere that it was single binary (had heard of Hugo, but didn't know it was single binary). I moved my blog from Jekyll to Zola as I found a theme I liked. [0] https://github.com/getzola/zola https://github.com/getzola/zola
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Ah, that's useful, thank you. I'm also looking for some personal experience, because, for example, while Hugo looks great on paper, its data model and template language frustrated me to no end the one time I tried to make something with it.
tl 6y ago
Zola is fast and simple, but there is a hard upper bound on what it can do, and the author has no desire to change this. One example is requests to support PostCSS instead of SASS. Zola's author doesn't want a dependency larger than the entire application. I'm currently using Zola + python/js scripts to do things Zola can't and considering a move to something like Pelican.
- Keats 6y ago
  > One example is requests to support PostCSS instead of SASS In practice to use PostCSS, you need npm to install plugins, and maybe a `postcss.config.js`, so there are no advantages of having that PostCSS call in Zola's `config.toml` or as a script in `package.json`. I don't really see how others SSG would handle that. Hugo just shells out a command to `postcss-cli` that needs to be installed (https://gohugo.io/hugo-pipes/postcss/ https://gohugo.io/hugo-pipes/postcss/), along with whatever plugins you are using. It's not really something "built-in".

FrontAid 6y ago

Does Pelican allow to use external content files that are not written in Markdown? I'd like to load content from a JSON file to enrich certain pages or even create whole site structures dynamically. I couldn't find anything related in neither the documentation nor the plugin repo. edit: It seems one might be able to write a custom reader for that according to https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#how-to-implement-a-new-reader https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#how-to-...

dragonsh 6y ago
Use the reader plugin pelican-json-reader [1] and modify for your own use case. [1] https://github.com/jessaustin/pelican-json-reader https://github.com/jessaustin/pelican-json-reader
- FrontAid 6y ago
  Thanks. It seems that Pelican is very restrictive in what content structures it allows. Do you know whether it can work with arbitrary JSON structures somehow?
  - dragonsh 6y ago
    In my other post I put a link [1] to pelican internal model. You can customise it the way you want as it’s a simple model. It’s not restrictive. You can write a plug-in to do what you would like and it’s easy with version 4.5. [1] https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#overall-structure https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/internals.html#overall...
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    Write a short python or javascript to do what you want and put it in a build script.

japhyr 6y ago

I have used Jekyll for years on a GitHub pages site. I like working with Jekyll overall, but the site has grown to a moderate size and now it takes about 8 seconds to render changes locally. When I started a new personal site last year I went with Hugo because one of its main selling points is speed. Can anyone share how Pelican's rendering speed compares to Jekyll and Hugo?

tuananh 6y ago
based on the language alone, hugo is probably winner here.
spapas82 6y ago
Haven't used the others but pelican is rather slow. For be blog, it takes a couple of minutes to generate the site and around 10 seconds to render any changes. That's my main complaint of pelican.
philshem 6y ago
I migrated from Pelican to Hugo. Build/render times are a fraction with Hugo. But my main issue with Pelican was git submodules for plugins. With Hugo I just find a theme I like and then everything works. For the record, I use Python daily and I’ve never written a line in Go. But with these static site generators, most people won’t ever need to look under the hood. Edit: I see the main feature for Pelican 4.5 is namespace plugins, which should prevent some headaches.
seanwilson 6y ago
I tested Hugo a few days ago on 10K posts and it took 40 seconds for a full build. It builds in a fraction of second if you've only got a few pages. I don't love the template language but aside from basic template features like if/then/else/not/forEach I don't really find I need to do much fancy when jumping between different static site generators or even WordPress. Hugo's speed wins out for me a lot of the time.
BeetleB 6y ago
Pelican is slow. If 8 seconds bothers you, you won't be happy with Pelican. I think there are settings where it kind of detects what has changed and only renders that output to speed it up, but I've not experimented with it. I rarely make changes to my site, so waiting is not a concern for me.

g8oz 6y ago

A comprehensive list of static site generators can be found at https://www.staticgen.com/ https://www.staticgen.com/

superkuh 6y ago
It's a good list, but the best static site generator is a human person writing .html files. All this static site generator stuff is unneeded complexity for those that enjoy complexity.
- TacoSteemers 6y ago
  > All this static site generator stuff is unneeded complexity for those that enjoy complexity. I don't think so, and will give a few examples why. I like Pelican because when working manually it is easy to mess up some HTML tags, forget to update an article listing, category listing, or RSS feed. Creating and adding PlantUML diagrams is more work manually than it is when integrated with Pelican. Pelican even tells me when I accidentally mess up an internal link. It simplifies my publishing such that I actually have enough time and energy to do so, and in that sense it is not unneeded complexity.
  - superkuh 6y ago
    These static site generators are mostly operating under the same conceptual model of what a website is and that's both very restrictive and brings in requirements that aren't actually requirements. Posts and categories and date dependent lists. Blogs aren't the only way. You can just make pages. You don't have to 'publish' and have every single page be exactly like every other page on your site. Maybe they should be called static blog generators instead.
    - TacoSteemers 6y ago
      Pelican does have support for random pages. If also doesn't stop you from copying your own pages to the output directory after generating. In that sense it is more of a markdown or RST to HTML converter. It has great blog support but doesn't exclude other uses, such as documentation generation. PS. I liked your post about the returned parrot.

liquid153 6y ago

I think Jekyll is only popular since its the only official static site generator supported by github pages

jeromenerf 6y ago

Here comes the "I use org mode BTW" comment. When it comes to my personal websites, I use org mode, because publishing is actually an exception in my day to day life. I use emacs for org mode only, but I use it all day long to keep notes, track todos, document projects, write prose and messages. Sometimes, I think something is worth publishing, so I mark it with the appropriate tags, run the publish command and let syncthing update the websites. I have used hugo for a dozen significant project and I like it. I have chosen hugo over the alternatives because I prefer go to javascript, ruby and python in almost all possible regards. I even teach classes to journalism students with hugo and gitlab. Static site generators are great for "projects" but as a individual willing to share some mildly interesting content as a side effect of his daily activities, I still consider them too much work and maintenance.

clankyclanker 6y ago
Have you considered org-mode to markdown and ikiwiki? That seems to be the simplest single-user publishing system I’m aware of.
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  No, I have not. I have chosen org for its numerous features and publishing is just one of them.

jshen 6y ago

I use Pelican, and am happy with it, but I wish it had better options for simple templates/themes.

crossroadsguy 6y ago

I have tried couple of them. Then I realised all I needed was some HTML, few lines of CSS, and zero JS and definitely no static site generator. I am not saying no one else needs it. However, the majority of sites I've seen that are generated via static site generators are using static site generators just because they can.

wishinghand 6y ago
If it's more than two pages I'd use one just because I hate copy-pasting stuff for headers/footers. I know vanilla PHP allows templating but static hosts can't run that. If only HTML allowed for importing fragments.
- jccooper 6y ago
  Something like staticjinja makes simple edit-side templating quite reasonable. It even does live rebuilding. Nice simple lightweight way to do static site building if you don't need all the CMS-type stuff. https://github.com/staticjinja/staticjinja https://github.com/staticjinja/staticjinja
- tasogare 6y ago
  You can use PHP while hosting in static if you generate all the pages upfront. This is what I do for my website (3 pages, soon 4, for i18n). In addition of i18n, it allows me to generate most of the tedious context by factoring them in functions. I build with a 4 lines script, and upload with another.
- freetonik 6y ago
  I found Sergey[0] a great solution for this one particular problem. [0]. https://sergey.cool/ https://sergey.cool/

tardismechanic 6y ago

FWIW, a leaderboard of SSGs: https://www.staticgen.com/ https://www.staticgen.com/

MisterPea 6y ago
Why is this space so bloated?
- tobr 6y ago
  Probably because of bike shedding. It’s not exactly hard to write some simple code from scratch to read the input files, pass them through various parsers, templates, processors, and write out the result. The heavy lifting is done by the processors, which you typically don’t need to write yourself. So an SSG is an attempt to put an abstraction on top of this, which may have some benefits but also introduces a lot of relatively uncalled for complexity and fragile dependency chains. And because the nature of the task is very heterogeneous, the API will either have to be very allowing (and less useful as an abstraction) or impose various assumptions and restrictions on how you do things. That’s very fertile ground for a lot of people to want to create their own take on it as they run into limitations of existing SSGs.
  - divbzero 6y ago
    > It’s not exactly hard to write some simple code from scratch to read the input files, pass them through various parsers, templates, processors, and write out the result. I think this is it exactly. You could roll your own if you wanted and package it as a library without too much difficulty and I haven’t found compelling reasons why any one static generator is superior to another. It seems to come down to which generators are supported by default by your hosting service, or your language of preference if you’re building custom extensions.
  - mturmon 6y ago
    100% agree. Thus, the real question is not: "Why are there so many static site generators?" It is rather: "Why isn't there a static site generator generator?"

GekkePrutser 6y ago

I'd never heard of Pelican but I have to say their site is doing an really bad job at explaining what it does and how :) I'd expect some screenshots and some points. All I learned from reading it is that it supports markdown but not really what kind of site it's for (e.g. blogs like wordpress etc). I'm looking for a static generator to make a blog (static mainly for security and because I don't want to do anything complex anyway). But not sure if this will suffice.

mixmastamyk 6y ago
That's a dev-blog, try: https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/ https://docs.getpelican.com/en/stable/ The site itself is sort of the screenshot.

auraham 6y ago

I am a Pelican user and I love it. My blog is made with Pelican. I also tried Hugo, Gatsby, and Jekyll, but they require much more orchestation than Pelican. There are two areas that can be improved: documentation and themes. I got difficulties trying to customize my blog (syntax highlighting, integration with jupyter notebooks, latex support, and so on). Most of the time the answers were in another blog, not in the docs. Also, the default theme is not attractive for new users. That prevents them to even give it a try.