Hello again, world! For the last several months, this blog was offline simply because I neglected to renew the VPS that I was hosting it on, and I didn't bother to rectify the situation since this blog was always a hobby project to begin with. I finally scrounged up some spare time over the winter holidays to do just that.

Several years back I migrated from Wordpress to Pelican for a variety of reasons, one of them being the reduced maintenance burden at a much lower cost. At the time I thought hosting a static blog on my own self-maintained …

Pelican (the static site generator that I'm using to generate this blog) doesn't seem to generate a sitemap on its own, so I spent a bit of time today searching for a way to do so that's easily integrated with Pelican; surely someone must have already solved this problem, right? Well, it turns out that indeed, there's already a plugin for it in the pelican-plugins repository, and it's really easy to use!

pelicanconf.py:

PLUGIN_PATHS = ['/path/to/cloned/pelican-plugins/repo']
PLUGINS = ['sitemap']

SITEMAP = {
    'format': 'xml',
    'priorities': {
        'articles': 0.5,
        'indexes': 0.5,
        'pages': 0.5
    },
    'changefreqs': {
        'articles': 'monthly',
        'indexes': 'daily' …

I've finally taken the plunge and migrated from my old Wordpress.com site to my new and (hopefully) improved Pelican-built site! If you're reading this, you probably have two questions: "why?" and "how?"...so let's tackle them in that order.

Why? A lot of it comes down to the advantages that static site generators like Pelican have over the dynamic CMS that is Wordpress. Wordpress is without doubt a very powerful CMS, and it has a thriving, large community around it that adds on even more value to Wordpress through its huge collection of plugins. It's also really easy …