Static Site Generation with Pelican
Every once in a while I feel like experimenting with standard website bits. You know, the classics, html / css / javascript. Not often enough though and if the topic comes up I usually disclose that while I can make a website, you probably don't want me to make your website. Still, here I am again, looking for shortcuts to make things a little more fun or a bit easier.
So now we come to static site generation with Pelican. The premise is that given content written in something simple like Markdown and a template, you can generate an entirely static website. Beyond the Jinja2 templating, there isn't any programming involved after setting things up (and it's arguable if Jinja counts as programming at all).
Documentation for Pelican is good with a little ambiguity here and there but nothing that isn't cleared up with some experimentation. I can't think of anything to add except that I'm enjoying writing Markdown in Neovim instead of HTML or logging into a CMS like Wordpress (or, rather, mucking about with Wordpress configs, templates or the database as one does instead of, you know, actually writing anything).
I incorporated Skeleton -- a bare-bones, mobile-first, grid-based, boilerplate web framework -- into a custom Pelican theme. The whole process of creating a template was very easy but I did have prior experience with Jinja.
This was all surprisingly straight forward. Pelican earns an A+. Maybe we can sauce things up with GitHub's Actions to dynamically compile & deploy the site when updates are committed to my repository in the near future.