I recently migrated my blog from Wordpress to Pelican. Pelican is a static-site generating blog system which is written in Python and uses Jinja2 for templating. I'll probably do a post about the migration process later, but for now, I'll just give my reasons for moving to Pelican...

Data Longevity

I didn't want my blog data stored in a database; I vastly prefer it being stored in version-controlled Markdown format.

Markdown

• I wanted to write blog posts in Markdown (which is possible in Wordpress, but Wordpress isn't designed to use Markdown).
• I also get to use vim to write my blog posts now, which is much nicer than the Wordpress editor.

Language

• I hate PHP, but love Python. It worried me that my blog was sitting on a giant, ugly PHP stack.
• Also, because Pelican is in Python, the code base is much, much cleaner and customizations are much easier.

Security

• Pelican outputs a static HTML/JS/CSS site, which exposes a much smaller attack surface than the large Wordpress stack.
• I had my Wordpress site hosted on a shared hosting environment, on which I didn't have HTTPS for my blog (so my Wordpress admin password was being transmitted in plain text). With Pelican, I log in over ssh.

Version Control

• With Pelican, my blog content and configuration is stored in Github, so I have full version control over everything.
• It's true that Wordpress has it's own version control, but I trust (and enjoy) git a lot more.

Mobility

Because everything is in git, and because I only need basic static HTML webserver capabilities, I can host my site just about anywhere. So I can easily change hosts if I see fit.

Nice Octopress theme

The default Pelican theme is pretty bad, but I love the Octopress theme, which has been ported to Pelican.

Speed

nginx serving static HTML/JS/CSS files is very fast. Preliminary tests showed that my site would load 3-10x faster than with wordpress.

Staging changes and easy deployment

• In Pelican, I can make large changes to the entire blog, regenerate it, and run a staging server to verify that my changes work before ever deploying them.
• Pelican comes with a Makefile to make blog generation, testing, and deployment very easy
• The command to regenerate the blog is make html
• The command to run a staging server is make serve or make devserver
• The command to deploy is make ssh_upload

Nicer syntax highlighting

Pelican has very nice syntax highlighting with Pygments

See:

# Result: 1.6180339887498947
reduce(lambda acc,_: (acc+1.0)/acc, xrange(100), 1)

Easy code file inclusion

Include code syntax:

{% include_code python/liquid_tags_test.py lang:python %}

Result:

from urllib2 import urlopen
data = urlopen("http://calebmadrigal.com/static/code/python/liquid_tags_test.py").read()
print data

Ability to embed IPython Notebooks

Thanks to Jake VanderPlas liquid_tags plugin, I can embed an IPython Notebook like this:

{% notebook ipython_notebook/EmbedNotebookExample.ipynb %}

Which looks like this:

In [5]:

x = linspace(0, 4*pi, 100)
y = 5 * sin(x)
_ = plot(x,y,'ro')