My first post
When it comes to blog hosting, I have played with everything under the sun ranging from standard blog hosting platforms like wordpress to writing custom blog code on appengine. WordPress doesn’t work for me due to numerous security bugs in it and appengine is too heavy for something simple like blog + personal information site like this one.
So, just yesterday I finally found some time and actually played with pelican and different pelican themes. Pelican is tthis amazing site generator that generates full blown blog in plain HTML format (no database, no servlet, etc.) from simple markdown languages. It has extensive list of templates which people have contributed. Also, since it is just static content, you really can host it from anywhere and it is BLAZING FAST!!!
I was able to get full website up and running in matter of 30 minutes – that includes selecting template, figuring out how I will organize my posts, static pages like project list, resume, etc. and other assets like images.
For previous version where I had simple servlet serving HTML page from java servlet, binary size was 35Mb but with static html content, file is 480kb. No wonder it is fast. I strongly recommend this static site generator approach to people who just want to host blogging sites. It is fast, secure and really low maintenance.
I am loving it so much that I actually decided to move over to this site instead of my last appengine attempt. You guys should really try it as well.
Rakesh Yadav's homepage 