The last two years have been spent ignoring this site so obviously it is time to redo it. A coworker told me about Pelican a while back and it seemed like it would fit my needs so I gave it a try. I turned out to be really easy and I managed to convert the site to use Pelican and publish to Heroku in about two hours.

First I installed Pelican into a virtualenv and ran the quickstart:

pip install pelican
pelican-quickstart

The quickstart just asks a few simple questions about the site. When it was done I poked around in pelicanconf.py to see what knobs could be fiddled with. I fixed up the timezone, removed SITES and filled in the SOCIAL links. This is what it looks like today:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*- #
from __future__ import unicode_literals

AUTHOR = u'Tom Manley'
SITENAME = u'Tom Manley'
SITEURL = 'thomasmanley.org'

PATH = 'content'

TIMEZONE = 'America/Chicago'

DEFAULT_LANG = u'en'

DEFAULT_CATEGORY = 'Dev'

ARTICLE_URL = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/{date:%d}/{slug}/'
ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/{date:%d}/{slug}/index.html'

# Feed generation is usually not desired when developing
FEED_ALL_ATOM = None
CATEGORY_FEED_ATOM = None
TRANSLATION_FEED_ATOM = None

# Social widget
GITHUB_URL = 'https://github.com/tpmanley'
SOCIAL = (('Twitter', 'https://twitter.com/tpmanley'),
          ('Github', 'https://github.com/tpmanley'),
          ('LinkedIn', 'https://www.linkedin.com/in/tpmanley/'),)

DEFAULT_PAGINATION = False

Since I setup Fabric during the quickstart process, testing the new site is easy:

fab reserve

This builds and serves up the site at http://127.0.0.1:8000. The first thing that struck me is how nice it looks. Just another reminder that I'm not a frontend kind of guy.

Moving the content to Pelican was easy since it was already in Markdown. I just moved the static pages into content/pages/ and the single blog post (yeah, I don't write much) into content.

The last step was to publish the new site on Heroku. First I enabled the Heroku buildpack:

heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/getpelican/heroku-buildpack-pelican

Then I removed the web: line from the Procfile so now it is empty. Finally I committed all the changes and pushed to Heroku like normal. And that was basically it!

Only thing left to do is start writing more, and maybe replace the default theme.