Lo-Fi Python

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.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/get-started/

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.

Like static site generators? Check out this post about static site generator libraries in Python.

8 Promising Python Static Site Generators

A static site generator creates static HTML and markdown files to serve as a website. They're commonly used to host blogs but not exclusively. I recently researched my options to roll a static site in Python. I'm assessing a few of them as a potential future self-hosted blogging solution for this Wordpress blog. Or maybe I'll spin up a new one!

Why Statics?

Most "modern" websites are dynamic in the sense that the contents of the site live in a database, and are converted into presentation-ready HTML only when a user wants to see the page. That's great. However, it presents some minor issues that static site generators try to solve.

In a static site, the whole site, every page, everything, is created before the first user even sees it and uploaded to the server as a simple folder full of HTML files (and images, CSS, etc).

The Nikola Handbook - https://getnikola.com/handbook.html#why-static