Matthias Friedrich's Blog

Going Static

It took me a while, but I had planned to migrate this blog from Wordpress to a static site for a long time. In fact, writing my posts in ReStructured Text and storing them in source control is how I started out (I had a script to convert RST to a format that I could paste into the Wordpress editor). Now I'm back to that, I switched to Pelican, a static site generator, and I publish the site on my personal server.

I used wordpress.com for more than 15 years on the free tier, but paid 15 dollars a year to connect my domain. For 48 dollars I could get rid of the annoying ads, but that seemed a little bit expensive, especially since I haven't been blogging that much lately.

There's a large number of static site generators. I chose Pelican for several reasons:

It's written in Python

It supports content in ReStructured Text or Markdown

The templates use Jinja 2

Wordpress import is supported

Even though it's not as popular as other tools, I'm familiar with the technology, which means I can customize or troubleshoot it, if necessary.

Of course, when going static there's some things that are missing compared to Wordpress:

Search

Comments

Analytics

While I didn't care much about comments or analytics (I could always embed third-party services like Disqus or Google Analytics), search was very important and it took me a while to implement something usable.

Using the LetsEncrypt Certbot, setting up TLS was as simple as ever and the Qualys SSL Server Check gave me an A rating for, which I boosted to A+ by manually setting the HSTS header. The only other thing I had to do was enabling HTTP/2, which Certbot doesn't do by default (there's not even a command line switch for it).

Other articles

Let's Encrypt on Wordpress.com

Published: Sun 10 April 2016
By mafr

In meta.

tags: best practices security web

A couple of days ago, Wordpress.com announced that they are now supporting TLS for custom domains (which is how this blog is hosted). There are many reasons for not hosting a blog yourself even if you have the necessary skills, like not having to deal with security updates and …
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Five Years of Blogging

Published: Sun 01 January 2012
By mafr

In meta.

tags: web

When I started this blog in December 2006, I didn't think I'd keep going for five years. Now, more than a hundred articles later, there's still no shortage of topics to write about. Five years is like eternity in my line of business, so let's not dwell in the past …
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Moving to blog.mafr.de

Published: Sat 23 July 2011
By mafr

In meta.

tags: networking web

This blog has been running for four and a half years now. That's quite a while in internet time, so I've decided to move it to my own domain at http://blog.mafr.de/ (the old URL will be valid indefinitely, though). Since I don't want to host a Wordpress …
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Tag Cloud and New Theme

Published: Sat 15 January 2011
By mafr

In meta.

Web sites need design updates from time to time and this blog is no exception. While I was mostly happy with the Sapphire theme, code examples didn't look good and it didn't support widgets on the article pages. Most importantly, however, its tag cloud was quite ugly which prevented me …
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So Much for 2010

Published: Sun 02 January 2011
By mafr

In meta.

2010 is over and almost forgotten already and my blog has been running for four years now. Like in previous years, I haven't been posting much, but pretty regularly. The helpful people from Wordpress sent me an email with some statistics I'd like to share.

This blog has seen 31 …
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Top Articles in 2008
Published: Thu 01 January 2009
By mafr

In meta.

2008 is done and over with. Before moving on I'll follow David's example and post my most popular articles in terms of page views.

Here they are:
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Meta: One Year of Blogging

Published: Sat 22 December 2007
By mafr

In meta.

I've been blogging for a full year now and since the calendar year is coming to an end, too, it's time for a tiny bit of reflection. One of the main premises of this blog is to keep meta blogging low, so this article is going to be a rare …
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Other articles

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