Pelican Publisher Script

When kartones.net was a blogging community and not my current personal minimalistic landing page, one of the blogs that my friend Lobo666 and I maintained was Uncut. With the change to BlogEngine.Net it kept working easily, with a combination of a WYSIWYG editor (or Windows Live Writer) and uploading post images via FTP (minor manual step). But when I recently moved everything to static sites, as Pelican not only doesn't provides any editor but forces you to build the site to preview the changes, my friend was quite impeded to keep posting at the blog.

On the other hand, I already had some post-processing scripts, to cleanup some files that were always copied to the output folder (and thus, uploaded to the site) and to do other tiny tasks like duplicating files (I want to maintain backwards compatibility with the original RSS feed addresses of the old blogs). They were ad-hoc, but after showing them to my friend he just asked me "if I could just make those scripts also upload automatically the modified files". And indeed, making some changes to pass by command line optionally some post identifier (I decided to use the slug) would help. As would too ease things just removing all the "full indexed pages" that Pelican builds (index<zero-to-almost-infinite>.html pages), and just leaving 10 pages and a link to the full archives page:

This way, and removing the tags, categories and authors subfolders as I don't use them, the number of modified files to upload on a mere new blog post action is around a dozen, making it blazing fast to "deploy" with some Python code. In the end, generalizing the script for the three blogs that I still write and/or maintain, by specifying a few configuration parameters you can specify folders to create or delete, files to copy, remove, duplicate, truncating the index files... and of course upload a post or just build without uploading.

I don't want to extend myself much more as the utility of this tool is limited and very specific, getting to the point, I uploaded the script files to my Python assorted GitHub repo. The direct url of the publisher files is: https://github.com/Kartones/PythonAssorted/tree/master/pelican/publisher.

Usage is quite simple:

python3 publisher.py your-great-post-slug

And to only build:

python3 publisher.py

And that's all. Until next time :)