Lektor VS Pelican

The static site generator (SSG) landscape is crowded with feature-rich but increasingly complex solutions. As I looked at and used tools like lume, 11ty, lektor, or jekyll, I found myself drowning in configuration options, plugins, and middleware. What started as a simple desire to convert Markdown content into HTML had evolved into learning complex frameworks with steep learning curves.

I haven't used it since forever ago, but Lektor [0] is this weird in between. You need to be able to pip install and run `lektor serve` in the terminal but most else is done in the browser.

[0] https://www.getlektor.com/

Guess I'm one of the annoying users who complained when armin's Lektor (https://github.com/lektor/lektor) started going dormant back when, but I loved it for a while. I'm on Astro now, but a big thanks for helping a younger version for me.

Lektor is a modern and flexible static content management system that utilizes Python as its core language. It comes with an intuitive web-based admin interface, making it easy for content creators to manage and update the site. Lektor supports a variety of content types and has an active community that contributes to its continuous improvement.

Lektor CMS is sort of a prototype-ish thing doing this: https://www.getlektor.com/

It has (used to have? Can't find them on the site now) pre-packaged binaries that you would drop into a folder structure generated by the technically-minded person, and the content editor can simply click on that binary, which opens the backend of the CMS in the web browser, make changes and click deploy.

There have been several Flask-based CMS's but I don't remember most of them. IIRC Lektor is based on Flask.

Static hosting could be enough for many sites and one could combine the technical and UX advantages of your dynamic interface with the advantages of static sites for security and distribution.

I found that useful when i worked with https://www.getlektor.com/ years ago. In lektor the dynamic part runs on a users desktop machine, but it of course wouldn't need to.

https://gohugo.io/

It's written in go but what's great about it, unlike many competitors written in Javascript or Python, is that it is just a simple binary you download and run, you do not need to get a PhD in the go build system to start a web site also it is crazy fast. It can publish a site to something like S3 or Azure Storage behind a CDN and you do not have to worry about anything other than paying the storage and bandwidth bills.

Myself I've been procrastinating on getting myself a blog and my take is Hugo is not customizable enough for me without learning a lot of Go, so I have looked at are either Python-based or oriented towards scientific publishing oriented systems such as

https://getpelican.com/

https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/

https://quarto.org/

(I want to write stuff like https://ontology2.com/essays/PropertiesColorsAndThumbnails.h...)

I've given this list to people in your shoes and they usually react with information overload

https://jamstack.org/generators/

part of that is that there are 355 generators (there have to be some good ones in there somewhere) but it also uses the kind of miscommunication patterns we're used to in webtech where, for instance, you'd think they are pushing Javascript down your throat (the "J" stands for Javascript but the generators I've mentioned generate mostly HTML with just a little Javascript.)

Pick something simple and run with it, if I did that 2 years ago I'd be blogging now.

Not really tried the Claude 3.5, later tried o1-preview on github models and recently Qwen2.5 32B for a prompt to generate a litestar[0] app to manage a wysiwyg content using grapesjs[1] and use pelican[2] to generate static site. It generated very bad code and invented many libraries in import which didn't exist. Cluade was one of the worst code generator, later tried sieve of atkin to generate primes to N and then use miller-rabin test to test each generated prime both using all the cpu core available. Claude completely failed and could never get a correct code without some or the other errors especially using multiprocess, o1-preview got it right in first attempt, Qwen 2.5 32B got it right in 3'rd error fix. In general for some very simple code Claude is correct but when using something new it completely fails, o1-preview performs much better. Give a try to generate some manim community edition visualization using Claude, it generates something not working correct or with errors, o1-preview much better job.

In most of my test o1-preview performed way better than Claude and Qwen was not that bad either.

[0] https://github.com/litestar-org/litestar

[1] https://grapesjs.com/

[3] https://getpelican.com/

I swapped away from Wordpress to Pelican, a static site generator written in Python. The theme is a heavily customized version of Octapress - and its really performant with zero third-party dependencies / network requests.

Plus I like that I can literally click a button in Obsidian which formats a note, compresses/optimizes the media, and pushes it up to my website. Frictionless blog posting FTW.

https://github.com/getpelican/pelican

https://mordenstar.com

Though... recently I've been thinking about swapping over to Astro because the grass is always greener.

That's why I use Pelican as a static site generator.

https://github.com/getpelican/pelican

As the maintainer of the Python-based Pelican static site generator for over a decade, I can say with confidence that my experience has been nothing like what is described in this article.

Most of Pelican’s code was written by other people, and yet I have spent almost zero time debugging that code, much less my own. After taking advantage of Pelican’s rich plugin ecosystem and adding a handful of useful plugins, I continue to be amazed by how much time this publishing system saves me, and how little time I must spend to keep everything running smoothly.

What it would take to accomplish this by writing HTML by hand instead… I simply can’t fathom it. But once again, that’s just one person’s experience, and YMMV.

[0]: https://getpelican.com

Most static site generators will work to create a blog. I use pelican [1], which serves my needs.

You will likely need to edit your blogposts a little bit before putting them in the book. So I recommend a separate program for that altogether.

[1] https://getpelican.com/

In my experience, [Pelican](https://getpelican.com/) does a good job of allowing you to edit themes on all pages at once with its static page generator.

There are a lot of built in features designed more for blog-like websites, but I’ve found it pretty easy to make my personal website with it.

Pelican is a preferred option for Python developers.