Welcome to One New Universe, powered by Pelican. In this Universe, we will mostly talk about data and what they can tell us about the social and physical construct we live in.
Why Pelican? My blogging life has gone through several incarnations, almost entirely consisting of blog hosting sites. My needs are slightly different now. So are my wants for control of my blog. I needed a platform that would support markdown (including syntax highlighting for code and LaTeX rendering) and Jupyter notebooks. I wanted a platform where I could write in plain text, rather than in the GUIs that most blogging sites demand. Pelican is a python-based static site generator that cleanly separates the content from the page environment seamlessly. I used a custom perl script to write several websites, including mine, in graduate school, so this feels like coming back home. Since the content lives on my hard drive as plain text, I am free to host or move it anywhere.
I would highly recommend Pelican to anyone. It only needs a basic understanding of python and coding. I do not think I will write up a log of what I did, as the initial setup is not that hard and there plenty of good ones on the web (I used Notions and Notes and Pythonic Perambulations). Customization takes more time, which is still ongoing for me.
I intend to explore some fun ideas. Come along for the ride …
Update (Feb 5, 2016): I decided to finally upload this blog to github. After considering a couple different hosts, I decided github would best serve my needs and require the least overhead. And it is free. The runner-up was NearlyFreeSpeech.net, but the convenience of merely having to push each update was not something to be thrown away.
I will continue to tinker away at the CSS for the blog. I love dark themes, but the current font color is too bright. It needs to be more muted. The text in the sidebar needs to be smaller and more demarcated. I need to add comments.