Moving to a Static Site Generator

When I first set this website up a few years ago I wanted to use Django, mostly because I like Python and wanted to play around with Django. This required me to find somewhere to host it, the choices being either a Digital Ocean droplet that I manage myself or a cheapish app hosting service like Heroku (I realize all this makes me sound like I time traveled from 2012, but I just like keeping things kind of simple because my day job and side activities, such as working through Math Academy's courses, provide enough brain challenges).

I decided to go with Heroku and can't really remember why. Probably because it was cheap and fairly easy to set up my app in there. However fast forward to today and it seems completely unnecessary to have a Python application and PostgreSQL database just to serve some simple HTML pages. It also was completely unnecessary a few years ago, and a few years before that, and a few years before that, and you get my point. So I have moved my site over to a static site that uses Pelican.

Why Pelican I hear you say? Well I looked at Hugo, and it seemed really neat, but I didn't love the documentation and it seemed like Hugo probably provided more than I need (remember I said I like simple). After searching for "simple static site generators" in ye old search engine (I didn't even ask Claude!) I landed on Pelican. And I got the right feelings having perused the documentation to know it was worth taking for a spin. I liked it. It was easy to set up my custom theme, easy to configure, and mostly just takes my markdown files and produces some HTML. So here I am, now using Pelican.

Happy Halloween!