Dholdrums

Even before I stumbled onto the jewels that are Pelican and other static site generators, I had longed to replace my gallery albums.

Gallery was one of the first good open source image gallery systems out there. It did an okay job, but like WordPress, it was written in PHP and massively overengineered and overfeatured.

I once spent months setting up Gallery for a client. Apart from building and installing the software (pretty easy with FreeBSD's ports) and actually getting the images together, most of the time spent was trying to integrate the gallery output pages into the look and feel of the client's existing website. That was massively painful, but in the end, it worked beautifully.

Some time later, some devs overhauled the website, and my work was put on the shelf. A bit after that, the powers that be decided the new website was aesthetically challenged (a euphemism for ugly), and wanted me to revert back to my old site. Which I did. Except that Gallery broke. I'm not sure how. The database and files were restored to their exact states (we had been meticulous about backups), but we could never get it to look the same again. I talked to some gallery devs, and everyone just recommended I upgrade from gallery 2 to gallery 3.

In the end, the gallery images were only a small subsection of their website, so we ended up not restoring it, deciding it was not worth the trouble.

Since then, I've longed for something that would just spit out raw HTML and CSS, just like pelican.

It looks like Sigal is it.

It's not perfect, by default it wants to spit out new-agey Javascript galleries, blech. But it works with Jinja2, so it should be pretty easy to make it do what I want.

Stay tuned!

I recently decided to publicly mention a small project I've been hacking away on.

It was more or less in the I'm just hacking on some code state for a while. And then in the past year, I cleaned it up a bit, added an interface, and made it (barely) functional -- if a bit feature-incomplete.

So I wanted to show it to other people, and what better way to do that than at a lightning talk at a conference?

But I wanted to have more than a GitHub page to point to, and I really didn't want to spend the time to author up a fancy website (although I can understand some HTML/CSS, I'm not a web designer by any means), so I decided to give Pelican a shot at this job.

Pelican, although mostly designed for blogs, also does a decent job at static web pages.

I got it up and running in about an hour or so. I spent most of that time finding a good theme which I liked.

I'm very happy with the results: recalc.org.

So my overall consensus is that if you need a fairly simple website, and like the [edit with text editor] and then [run make to see your output] way Pelican works, it's the tool for you.