I noticed that my blog is not mobile friendly, so I changed my Pelican theme to use Bootstrap version 3, which has a responsive design. I am now using pelican-bootstrap3 with the Bootswatch United theme.

DISCLAIMER: This information may be out-of-date. This post was written using Pelican version 3.2 and the themes and plugins in July 2013. However, last I checked (August 2015), almost everything still works.

I thought it would be useful to go into greater technical detail about how I went about setting up Pelican.¹

My machine is running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

When I was setting up this blog, I initially started with Wordpress, but then I discovered that many (tech-savvy) people were using static site generators.

It took me some time to understand what that meant. Most of the common blogging platforms generate websites dynamically. Wordpress requires SQL to manage a database containing your blog content. When someone loads your blog URL, Wordpress generates the requested webpage. Wordpress must be installed on your webhost/server for this to work.

The idea behind static site generators is to have software on your local machine that creates webpages and then upload these pages to the webhost. The webpages have fixed content, hence the description "static site." You don't need to install anything on the webhost.