I've moved my blog from blogger.com to a static site generated with Pelican and hosted on GitHub Pages. This is a dump of some of the details.

The content is hosted in three branches across two repos:

The motivation for the split is that according to this pelican SEO article, master branches of GitHub repos are indexed by google, so if you store HTML content in a master branch your canonical blog might be battling your GitHub repo in the search results. And since you can only put content in the master branch of a $username.github.io repo, I added a separate blog.git repo. Maybe I could shove all the content into the blog/gh-pages branch I think dealing with multiple subdomains prevents it. I've already spent too much timing playing with all this stuff though so that's for another day to figure out. Of course, suggestions welcome, blog comments are enabled with Disqus.

One issue I hit is that pushing updated content to blog/gh-pages doesn't consistently trigger a new GitHub Pages deployment. There's a bunch of hits about this around the web (this stackoverflow post in particular) but no authoritative explanation about what criteria GitHub Pages uses to determine whether to redeploy. The simplest 'fix' I found is to tweak the index.html content via the GitHub web UI and commit the change which seems to consistently trigger a refresh as reported by the repo's deployments page.

You may notice the blog looks a lot like stock Jekyll with its minima theme. I didn't find any Pelican theme that I liked as much as minima, so I grabbed the CSS from a minima instance and started adapting the Pelican simple-bootstrap theme to use it. The end result is basically a simple reimplementation of minima for Pelican. I learned a lot in the process but it likely would have been much simpler if I just used Jekyll in the first place, but I'm in too deep to switch now!