How I Migrate My Data Science Blog from Pelican to Hugo

And you can too!

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

Motivation

Issues of Pelican

I’ve been using Pelican as the framework for my data science blog for a while now. It has worked for me, though there were always some minor glitches that made me feel not settled. It never feels complete and satisfying to me. Here are some of the big ones:

Small community and niche position

Pelican has a much smaller community than Hugo. It has 10.4k stars vs. the 51.4k stars on GitHub. On the Static Site Generator community, Pelican is a niche. People already know Python might want to try it out (like me!), but others with better understanding and programming skills might prefer other options. A smaller community comes with fewer themes, fewer plugins, and less support if you run into some weird issues. This is precisely my experience.

Lack of satisfying themes

It was pretty hard to find my current theme Elegant that have both a good look and feel as well as utilities. There are not many options, to begin with.

Small glitches that are hard to tackle

It took me quite some effort to fully get everything to work. Google Analytics, Disqus, Jupyter Notebook support, Table of…