New blog

I finally took the time to update my Wordpress blog and make it static. Having a PHP-based website in 2014 felt archaic. The new site is generated with Pelican, a great Python-based static blog generator.

Pelican doesn't get in my way, it's highly customizable, and it works with Markdown out of the box. That being said, I have the feeling that ReST is slightly better supported. I had to tweak a python-markdown extension to enforce Python as the default code highlighting language.

Previously, I had a home-made solution that was not very convenient. I would wrote a post in Markdown and convert it to HTML thanks to a custom Python script (calling pandoc under the hood). Then, I had to copy-paste the HTML code into Wordpress' admin interface. Wordpress was so slow, hard to configure and export, tricky to update, full of security holes. It seemed overkill for a basic personal website like this one.

Now, I can write my blog posts in Markdown and generate the entire website with Pelican. Then I just have to push the generated HTML pages on GitHub.

I found some plugins to add support for LaTeX equations (rendered with MathJax), code highlighting (with codehilite), and IPython notebooks.

For the theme, I used a Pelican theme built on Pure, a lightweight CSS responsive framework. It is less widespread than Bootstrap, but it feels less heavy and a bit simpler to use. It works great on mobile devices. I tweaked this theme by taking inspiration from a few blogs, included Nicolas Rougier's. I particularly like the font, Source Sans Pro. The font for the code is Ubuntu Mono.

Finally, I used Disqus for the comments. I was able to transfer the previous Wordpress comments into Disqus easily.