How I Developed My Website Using Python Pelican

2026-04-17T00:00:00-04:00

I have been using Jekyll with Github pages for my website. Jekyll is a great static site generator with many great themes available. I was quite happy with my Jekyll site. However, Jekyll is written in Ruby, I am much more comfortable with Python. I get really nervous about breaking something whenever I want to change the underlying theme. I chose Jekyll previously cause of the availability of great looking themes, which is not exactly the case with Pelican. I finally found the time and the determination to make the transition to Pelican recently. Unfortunately, after searching around online, Pelican still faces the same issues of lacking good looking themes. I will have to dive into Pelican and customize it for my website.

Pelican has a decent documentation site. The site's Getting Started provide basic installation, create a project and site generation guides. It is useful to go through them and have a sense of the Pelican workflow. However, I feel there are not sufficient materials for beginners like me who wants to build a good looking website for documenting my works. I search online and found two good tutorials here and here, that really help me with understanding Pelican, and I used LLMs like Gemini to help with the learning. I wrote a series of Pelican tutorials to document my Pelican learning journey. The tutorials are mainly for myself so I would remember what I have done. At the same time, I hope the tutorials can be helpful for anyone who is thinking of working on their own website using Pelican.

Designing with Computers - Tutorial

How I Developed My Website Using Python Pelican