Backlinks: How to publish website to HTML

If I get this on github pages, it will be a miracle.

So, I did. Here's how.

1. Note the date on this post, things may have changed.
2. Be ready with homebrew (on your Mac) and a github account.

Install virtualenv (with pip).

Create a new directory, i.e. "website", and start a virtual environment. I use autoenv (brew install autoenv), which executes a .env file if it exists when you change into a directory. Autoenv will ask you to confirm the .env file is correct.

cd website
virtualenv pyenv
echo "source /Users/andyreagan/website/pyenv/bin/activate" > .env
cd .

Now your prompt should be prefixed by "(pyenv)". Now start installing pelican.

pip install pelican
pip install markdown
pip install ghp-import

If you're going to migrate over posts from somewhere else (wordpress for me), get pandoc.

brew install pandoc

Now you can get started building the website with Pelican. First, make sure the github is set up. Follow the instructions on https://pages.github.com/, and leave the repository empty. Clone it into your working directory (website) with

git clone https://github.com/andyreagan/andyreagan.github.io .

Finally, build the website with Pelican. I just followed the tutorial on their documentation, which is excellent: http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.4.0/quickstart.html

Once you've got something showing in localhost, it's time to push it up to github. Hold your breath. The publishing script that I use, very simple is:

# publishsimple.sh

pelican content -s pelicanconf.py
ghp-import output
git push -f origin gh-pages:master

Some other goodies. All of this is well documented within Pelican's docs, but here it is. This is the tail of my pelicanconf.py:

# static paths will be copied without parsing their contents
STATIC_PATHS = [
    'images',
    'files',
    ]

# get a homepage on the menu bar
MENUITEMS = [("Home","/index.html",),]

# make the URL's look nice
ARTICLE_URL = '{date:%Y}/{date:%m}/{date:%d}/{slug}/'
ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = '{date:%Y}/{date:%m}/{date:%d}/{slug}/index.html'
YEAR_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = '{date:%Y}/index.html'
MONTH_ARCHIVE_SAVE_AS = '{date:%Y}/{date:%b}/index.html'

And I did fork my own theme. Copied over the theme from "pyenv/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pelican/themes/simple/templates/" into "theme/finnigan". I also created the "static" folder alongside "templates," and put the "css" and "js" and "images" folders inside static.

Then set this to be the theme in "pelicanconf.sh":

THEME='theme/finnigan'

If you've made it this far, start writing!

Cheers!

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