A new website with Pelican

We have just published our website using pelican and the bootstrap3 theme. Pelican is a static site generator, written in Python.

Going with a static site generator, rather than a database based one such as wordpress, seemed a good idea, for a few reasons:

• smaller attack surface (e.g. wordpress is regularly hacked)
• easier backup and maintenance - we keep everything in a mercurial repository
• it uses Python - we use Python a lot in the lab
• you can work on the site at any time and anywhere - you don't need to be online

There are lots of Pelican based academic sites which I looked at for guidance and ideas. Most useful are those that publish their source code on sites like github, e.g. Peter Wittek's site, Kyle Cranmer's Theory and Practice and many more. At some stage we might put our site on a public repository...