I have been using the Pelican static website generator for a few years, hosting the content on Github, automatically build on push via Travis-CI and deploy on Github pages to zonca.github.io.
I am a heavy Jupyter Notebook user so once I saw the announcement of Fastpages I decided it was time to switch. I loved the idea of having Jupyter Notebooks built-in and not added via plugins, also great idea to use Github actions.
Only issue I found was that you cannot setup Fastpages on username.github.io, so went for using a custom domain name instead.
Import content
I created a script, in Python of course, to modify the front matter of the markdown posts from the Pelican formatting to Jekyll, see pelican_to_jekyll.py. It also renames the files, because Jekyll expects a date at the beginning of filenames.
Setup paginate
Currently Fastpages doesn’t support pagination for the homepage, but implemented a workaround.
Update 12 March 2020: Now fastpages supports pagination natively! see the documentation
Redirect from the old Github Pages blog
I modified the permalinks of Fastpages so that I have the same URLs in the old and new websites, just the domain changes. Github pages does not support custom rewriting rules, so I modified the Pelican template to put a custom redirection tag in each HTML header.
In the Pelican template article.html, in the <header> section I added:
{% raw %}
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=https://zonca.dev/{{ article.url }}">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://zonca.dev/{{ article.url }}">{% endraw %}
So that Pelican regenerated all the articles with their original address and automatically redirects upon access. The canonical link hopefully helps with SEO.
Did the same with the index.html template to redirect the homepage, this depends on your template:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=https://zonca.dev">
<link rel="canonical" href="https://zonca.dev/">Screenshots of the old blog
Yeah, for posterity, growing older I get more nostalgic.
The homepage:
A section of an article page:
