Launching a Live Static Site Blog via Pelican, Github and Cloudflare Pages
Proud to announce my newest side project blog, Diversified Bullish, is live at divbull.com. It is made with Pelican and the Blue Penguin theme. I'm planning to write about stocks and investing there moving forward in addition to this blog which focuses on Python programming.
The divbull.com Github repo serves the static files generated by Pelican via Cloudflare pages. It's free, unless you purchase a domain. I purchased my .com domain with Namecheap before I learned about Cloudflare pages. I followed these instructions to set up my new financial blog. If you're interested, you can subscribe to an RSS feed here to follow when I post something new.
The dashboard provides a number of framework-specific presets. These presets provide the default build command and build output directory values for the selected framework. If you are unsure what the correct values are for this section, refer to Build configuration. If you do not need a build step, leave the Build command field blank.
Working in the Cloudflare pages build dashboard is sweet. It took me about 5 failed Pelican build commands to get the site to deploy. Finally, I was able to get the site build to complete by leaving the build command blank. Cloudflare was able to scoop up my Pelican "output" folder contents and render the blog. How cool. I feel like I've done the impossible, launching a passable quality blog with top shelf tools this quickly for under $10!
Initially, I spent a few hours getting to know Pelican. Once I correctly installed a theme I liked, I banged out a few philosophical financial musings to give the blog some posts. Then I had the static files generated but no clue how to serve them. Enter Cloudflare pages, a free option to host a blog.
Connecting the repo to Cloudflare pages, adding the files to the repo and finding the correct build command added a few more hours. In total, it took me about 1-2 days to make a live site since I did not know about Pelican or Cloudflare pages when I began playing with a Pelican blog in April. This was my first static site launch!
Generating a Blue Penguin themed Pelican blog.
Head over to divbull.com to see this Pelican, Github and Cloudflare pages stack in action.