Title: Moved the blog to pelican
Date: 2013-06-29
Lang: en

When I started my personal blog, I chose [Serendipity](http://www.s9y.org/) because some of the blogs I was reading back then were running on it. Also, it had a good reputation for being easy to set up and use - and it was.

Recently, a friend of mine sparked my interest in static blog generators like [jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com) or [octopress](http://octopress.org/). Reading more about those I two, I got really excited and wanted to dive right in. 

Octopress' install instructions tell you to use rbenv or RVM for the installation. This is where my pain begins. Alas, I alreay have two versions of Ruby installed (dependencies of packages I have installed on my [Gentoo](http://www.gentoo.org) machine), I'm not really keen on maintaining yet another version through RVM or rbenv.

So I started to look for alternatives to these frameworks in Python land - and found [pelican](http://docs.getpelican.com/). It recommends to install inside a [virtualenv](http://www.virtualenv.org/) which I find by far more sensible than the approach the Ruby folks recommend.

Long story short: I'm impressed! I played around with it for half an hour and came to the conclusion that I need a bit more content to explore my use cases. So I started to convert the existing blog entries manually - which was very easy. I had used markdown on github before so the choice was easy :-)

After two more hours I had converted all my existing blog entries. Later that day I replaced the existing blog with the new one - a decision that wasn't hard to make.