I've wanted to switch my blog to a static site for a while. I didn't want to continue paying for Wordpress for a not-so-frequently updated blog. But my previous attempts had failed.

A recent post about Digital Ocean App Platform made me take another look. DO App Platform is free for static websites! I searched JamStack for Python-based generators using Django/Jinja template languages. Pelican stood out as a tool with long history and continued maintenance. The out-of-the-box theme is decent, it has a plugin system, and can import my existing Wordpress blog. Perfect.

It took about 20 minutes to read their documentation, set up a repo with a quickstart. Export my wordpress site and import it into Pelican and have it published on my own personal domain. Not bad!

I can now use GitHub's in-browser VS Code to write my blogs in markdown!