Hello Pelican!

I finally did it! This is my first attempt to move away from Gatsby, static site generator that I used to write my blog previously.

Given that I work at Anaconda, and how everything revolves around Python, I decided to try Pelican.

My first encounter with Pelican was when I worked on engineering.anaconda.com last month and customised CSS there.

Why no to Gatsby

Gatsby was getting slow, and I knew at some point I had to migrate away from Gatsby. The last post I had published was in January.

Earlier this month, during FOSS Friday at Anaconda (once a month we all work on opensource projects) I decided to write a blog post for Anaconda's blog. I wanted to publish the first version of my draft on my blog, but when I tried to deploy Gatsby, it would not run. After n no. of efforts, event trying to upgrade to Gatsby v3 and v4, I had no luck.

Why no to Hashnode

My first choice was Hashnode, I had heard lot of good things about Hashnode and how Hashnode let users customise SEO too. I was able to publish my blog post on Hashnode, and in the excitement I also published 2 additional posts that I was wanting to write.

Hashnode was very easy to use and setup. But in the end I wanted to own and be able to customise my blog the way I wanted. I even considered paid options, because in ~6 months time I didn't want to run into the same problem I faced with Gatsby; i.e. either the tech dependencies get outdated and I need to spend time on catching up with the latest versions or some platform like Hashnode ends up restrictions on users.

Pelican it is

In the past, I have tried Jekyll and Hugo. I was not happy with both of them, mainly because they were not Javascript based. This is the reason, I was very happy in using Gatsby, and to add to my comfort, it was React based. I did get to learn GraphQL too.

Given the comfort zone I was in, I chose to ignore all of Gatsby's warning signs and at the time of writing this blog post I had to finally choose between Hashnode vs Pelican, and I chose Pelican.

Next steps

Over the last 2 years, I did spend decent time in customising my Gatsby blog; CSS, content and social sharing cards. In fact, I also wrote a custom Gatsby plugin to have automated social sharing cards in GIFs.

So far, I have all the things I need from Pelican. I will focus on writing as a consistent habit and when I get time I will try to migrate my entire blog to this newer version.

Fingers crossed!