blog.instantbird.org

This is the source for https://blog.instantbird.org. It is a static site generated using Pelican with separate articles stored under the content/articles directory. Each article is stored as a separate reStructuredText file.

Comments are read-only and use the pelican_comment_system plugin, they are stored under content/comments/<article-slug>/<globally-unique-id>.rst.

Additional static files are stored under other directories of content/.

The theme is converted from the WordPress PHP theme to Jinja_ files, but is generally unmodified.

Development

Note that development happens on the source branch from the git repository.

You'll first need to install Python 3, then setup a new virtualenv and activate it:

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Then install the necessary Python packages:

pip install -r requirements.txt

You should be all set to re-generate the content now! You can do this using invoke:

inv build

The results get stored in a directory called output/, you can easily serve them on localhost using the built in Python server:

inv serve

A general useful way to develop is to use three terminals:

1. The first terminal checks for changes to any of the project files and constantly re-runs Pelican to update the output: inv regenerate.
2. The second terminal serves the files: inv serve.
3. The last terminal is free to use git or other commands.

Publishing

Once changes are complete, they should be committed to git and pushed to the source branch. The rendered changes can be created and pushed to the server using invoke:

inv publish

This first runs Pelican with the publish configuration, then uses ghp-import to push the the output to the master branch on GitHub. It sometimes takes 5 - 10 minutes for the update to propagate to be viewable.

History

This blog was originally served via a custom blog engine, then converted to WordPress, now converted to Pelican. There might be some things lost / broken during those conversions, please let us know if you see any problems.