About this Blog

My original blog is EdTheDev.com. I recently registered delaporte.us; and decided that it would be nice to have a blog at edward.delaporte.us. DreamHost provides an excellent WordPress service, and I highly recommend it to anyone who needs a blog.

But as they said in 'Ocean's 13'; 'You don't do the same gig again, you do the next gig.' So I decided that it was time to find a blog technology that plays well with my latest suite of tools, while providing some minor theoretical improvement.

My requirements:

• Must allow me to compose my blog in either MarkDown or ReStructuredText.
• Must allow me to easily edit my blog entries in my favorite editor, Vim.
• Must still generate blog features that I rely on: RSS feeds, organization by category, automatic linking to recent articles.
• Article contents must be accessible to future descendants, this means that database files are out, and plain text files are important.

It turns out that Pelican does a very nice job meeting these requirements.

So now I compose my blog entries in Vim, use Pelican to generate HTML and RSS files, and publish with a simple Rsync to my DreamHost server.

As a nice side effect, requests to my server do not go through any processing at all, so the server strain should be incredibly minimal. Between that, and how responsive DreamHost is, I expect to be well prepared if I am ever Internet-famous for fifteen minutes. This wasn't part of my requirements, but it is a cool side-effect of using Pelican.