My website is built using the Pelican static website generator. “Pelican” is an anagram for “calepin”, which means “notebook” in French. Pelican is written in Python and as such can be extended with plugins also written in Python.
The “static” means that the resulting website pages are not generated on the fly using PHP, MySQL, etc. Instead, HTML pages are generated locally and then uploaded to the web server. This adds to the security of the website.
Site Theme Used
The theme used for my website is derived from pelican-twitchy. I have made various adaptations, for example, to have my photo and postcard pages appear differently.
Regular Plugins Used
- dateish - to work with an original article date.
- Pelican doesn't sort well on “modified:”, so I'm using “date:” alone or as modified date together with “original:” with this plugin as original article date.
- extract_toc - to add a table of contents here and there.
- neighbors - to add links to previous and next pages at the end of each page.
- pelican-linkclass - to add a little marker to external links.
- summary - to be able to
limit the page summaries.
- I have derived an additional plugin ”summary_only” from this one, which is used for my photo and postcard pages to show thumbnails only in the summary and not on the main page. See also my own Campaphoto plugin.
- tag_cloud - to differentiate font size in the
tag overview depending on number of articles.
My Own Campaphoto Plugin
I have created my own plugin “campaphoto”, merging functionality of the existing photos and lightbox plugins. Functionality was updated to my own needs and parts not needed were removed.
Photos (and videos) are added with a caption derived from existing photo (or video) meta data. Following features are available:
- Regular photo support, allowing to show a caption and photo file name, and allowing to view a large version upon click (lightbox).
- Small photo support, without caption but still with lightbox functionality. See the pelican image on this page.
- Support for small thumbnails as summary, as used with my photo and postcard pages.
- HTML5 MP4 video support, also allowing to show caption and video file name, and allowing to have a (download) link to a larger MKV version.