When I decided to start writing this blog, I played around with blogger, wordpress and tumblr, but didn’t really get along with any of them - they all seemed a bit too heavyweight for what I wanted. I didn’t need much - just the ability to specify some HTML/CSS for the styling and then a quick and easy way to write and publish posts.

I stumbled across calepin which seemed more along the right lines. Unfortunately it had no support for theming (HTML/CSS etc), however the system behind calepin, known as pelican, was freely available to use standalone and did give you full control over the styling of your blog. So that’s what I’m using today for this blog.

Here is a diagram showing the pelican set up behind this blog:

I write my posts in markdown and push them to a github repo. A git service hook then causes a pelican instance running in Amazon EC2 to convert this markdown to HTML and push it to a github pages repo for hosting. It’s worth noting that github pages and Cloud9 IDE are completely free at the time of writing. EC2 have a year long free tier before charging.

The wrapper around pelican that responds to the git service hook and manages the git repos is a python script I’ve unimaginatively called pelicangit - feel free to fork it, play with it and/or provide feedback/criticism.

So far, this set up has been nice to work with. I really like the simplicity of writing a blog post as a markdown file with a few headers and then pushing it to a git repo to publish it. Plus, the best thing about pushing pelican into the cloud is that I can write my blog posts from my Chromebook, which can’t run pelican locally :)