The default recommendation of GitHub Pages is jekyll, but I prefer Python than Ruby to write something. As a result, I found pelican to write my blog on GitHub Pages. Here, http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.6.0/quickstart.html

The installation is quite easy in pythonic way:

c:> pip install pelican markdown

The pip will automatically install other dependencies for you such as jinja2, etc.

Then I can start my project, first, create an appropriately-named directory and switch to it (we call it site directory):

mkdir focusheart.github.io
cd focusheart.github.io

Create basic files via the pelican-quickstart command:

pelican-quickstart

Most of the questions have default values in brackets. When finished, we can start writing the first article:

cd content
vim hello-world.md

The basic content may like this:

Title: Hello World
Date: 2015-07-07 10:20
Category: Development
Tags: pelican, python
Slug: hello-world

Hello, world!

The syntax follows Markdown Extensions. When done writing, generate the HTML by the following command in site directory:

pelican content

Then we can launch a web server to see the article.

cd output
python -m pelican.server

Preview our site by navigating to http://localhost:8000 in my browser.

More Configuration

In order to work with GitHub Pages, I changed some config to make it easier to sync all sources and generated contents with GitHub. The pelican config file is hosted at https://github.com/focusheart/focusheart.github.io/blob/master/pelicanconf.py.

More then default configs, I modified and added some following:

SITEURL = '' # I found this works well for me
OUTPUT_PATH = '' # output everything in root dir
STATIC_EXCLUDES = ['images'] # seems no use
ARTICLE_EXCLUDES = ['images'] # the same as above
PAGE_EXCLUDES = ['images'] # the same
STATIC_EXCLUDE_SOURCES = False # the same

# I changed the default article url and save file 
ARTICLE_URL = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{slug}.html'
ARTICLE_SAVE_AS = 'posts/{date:%Y}/{slug}.html'
PAGE_URL = 'pages/{slug}.html'
PAGE_SAVE_AS = 'pages/{slug}.html'

The above config works well, but the images in content/images will be duplicated and sync to GitHub. Then I add .gitignore to ignore the generated directory images and other files:

/images/
*.pyc

The detail in https://github.com/focusheart/focusheart.github.io/blob/master/.gitignore

The most of my work done, and I will try my best to update this blog~