We migrated the LinkPeek blog from static HTML to a static HTML blog generated with pelican. There are many static site generators and blogs frameworks to choose from. We decided to move our blog to pelican for the following reasons:

• To improve blog organization

  We now have Categories, tags, and a blog roll. Our posts are now linked together intelligently.

• To improve efficiency

  We can now quickly write posts in ReSTructuredText which converts into HTML. The markup is also portable.

• To improve design

  We had the ability to write a custom theme using jinja.

• To improve enjoyment

  Pelican is more fun to use then writing static HTML by hand.

• To improve SEO

  Each post now has a direct URI which promotes sharing.

• To improve blog speed and durability

  Static HTML is now served directly by nginx instead of paster/cherrypy.

• To improve project organization

  We placed the linkpeek blog into a separate repository to the rest of the linkpeek.com website. We still may use hg mercurial!

• To save developer resources

  At first we wanted to code our own static site generator. This would have taken time away from developing our core product, linkpeek webpage to screenshot API. We choose pelican over the competition because we agreed with the projects software design choices, we thought the pelican-quickstart was a great way to setup a skeleton project, and the configuration required was minimal to get started.

Hopefully this change help create a habit of more frequent posting!