Updating Website to Pelican

It's been a while since I've last blogged. I place the blame squarely on three things:

1. Laziness
2. Too busy
3. Too complicated

Numbers 1 & 2 are constant uphill battles to fight and there's nothing to do but recognize them and try to do better. Number 3, however, amplifies the first two.

Previously, my site was based on Splash, which is written in Swift. And while this started out great, it became cumbersome to add some features and customize aspects of the site. As you can seen, it also hasn't been updated in ~3 years.

The last thing I did to the site was update the link to my Twitter account to point to my Mastodon account. While this should have been trivial, it took me 2 or 3 tries to get right and was a bit frustrating.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. I took a week vacation with my brother-in-law to northern Finland to see the northern lights¹. While there, I started working on converting my site to use Pelican.

I like that Pelican is written in Python. While I have a lot of experience in Swift, I have even more in Python. An added benefit of this, is that LLMs tend to be better at writing Python than Swift², making it easier to brainstorm with them.

It was fairly straight forward to convert my Splash plugins to Pelican plugins and then I wrote a few more to make my site more like I want. In a future post, I'll be using some of the new features I've added.

All in all, I'm hoping that the new setup makes it easier for me to write and that I will do so more often.

I've also added a new section TIL, which will allow me to post short snippets of things I've learn. I got the idea from Simon Willison.

Here's hoping for a more active blogging life!