Bye! Google Sites, Hello! Github pages

For close to 2 years (the time since I got the domain), I had married myself to Google sites for my own blog and site. It was not a happy marriage. While it might have worked for others, the inherent inability to change anything or use any of the good tools out there, for my content creation did not give me any comfort. I tried hard to use what is provided and finally gave up. I decided that, may be having my own site is really not worth it.

Github Pages

For sometime, I have been hearing about Github pages, but never thought too much about it. Then I got chatting with one of my friends and he talked about using Github pages with Octopress as the content management system for his blog. This really piqued my interest and I decided that I would give it a go.

So I went through the documentation of github pages and figured out how to create a user site and put a place holder page in it.

It was not great but it was a start. I used bootstrap for the css and used some basic elements on the page.

I also made my domain point to it. It took a day (may be two) for the dns records to get updated and viola! my new site was up. I had finally broken the shackles and escaped from the tyranny of Google sites. My new journey had begun.

Pelican

Now my friend had talked about using octopress for his blog. I felt that using a static file based content management system was surely a good idea but I wanted to use a python based one instead of a ruby one. A quick search lead me to Pelican.

Pelican seemed to fit my bill. I could use markdown (which was another thing I meant to learn) to get my content. Pelican documentation looked pretty good and it was easy to get started. There was a good amount of configurability in Pelican. Also there was support for themes and plugins (which is python based and that looks interesting to me). The available collection of ready made themes seemed reasonable and I picked the bootstrap 3 based one called pelican-bootstrap3 from Daan. This post is written on this base setup. I am still to add any plugins to the site but that can wait.

I wanted to get started. And now I have!