Okay, here’s my attempt at writing a blog post about my experience with “pelican spirit animal,” following your instructions and the example you provided.
Alright, so I dove headfirst into figuring out this whole “pelican spirit animal” thing. I mean, the name alone kinda grabbed me. Sounded way cooler than, like, “default blog setup.”
First things first, I had to actually install Pelican. Pretty straightforward, followed the docs. pip install pelican, then pip install markdown. Boom, done. Felt like a hacker for a solid five minutes.
Next up, I needed to create a basic site structure. Pelican’s got this nifty pelican-quickstart command. Ran that, answered a bunch of questions about my site name, author, default language, etc. Nothing too crazy. It kinda just spits out all the folders and files you need to get going.
Then, the real fun started: writing content. I decided to go with Markdown because, well, everyone’s using it. Created a new file called in the content folder. Started typing about… I don’t even remember. Probably something profound about the internet. Used headers, lists, the whole shebang.
After that, I needed to actually generate the site. This is where Pelican works its magic. You just run pelican content in your terminal, and it takes all your Markdown files and turns them into HTML. Pretty neat.
But… the site looked kinda… blah. So, I had to find a theme. Pelican has a bunch of themes you can download and install. I browsed through them, picked one that I liked (it was called “notmyidea” or something), and stuck it in the themes folder. Then, I had to tell Pelican to actually use the theme in the file.
Finally, I ran Pelican again to regenerate the site with the new theme. Much better! Still kinda basic, but way less ugly.
To actually see my website, I had to run a local server. Pelican makes this easy with the pelican --listen command. This starts a server on your computer, and you can open your site in a web browser.
The whole process was pretty smooth. I messed up the theme installation a couple of times, and I had to google some stuff about how to customize the theme, but overall, it was a good experience. I even learned a bit about web development along the way. I got the site up and running. Time well spent!
