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If you want to create a custom website or blog, you have a lot of options. Many providers will host your website and do much of the work for you. (WordPress is an extremely popular option.) But you lose some flexibility by using a hosted solution. As a software developer, I prefer to manage my own server and keep more freedom in how my website operates.

However, it is a fair amount of work to manage a web server. Installing it and getting a simple application up to serve content is easy enough. But keeping on top of security patches and updates is very time-consuming. If you just want to serve static web pages, having a web server and a host of applications may be more effort than it's worth. Creating HTML pages by hand is also not a good option.

This is where a static site generator can come in. These applications use templates to create all the static pages you want and cross-link them with associated metadata. (e.g., showing all the pages with a common tag or keyword.) Static site generators help you create a site with a common look and feel using elements like navigation areas and a header and footer.

I have been using Python for years now. So, when I first started looking for something to generate static HTML pages, I wanted something written in Python. The main reason is that I often want to peek into the internals of how an application works, and using a language that I already know makes that easier. (If that isn't important to you or you don't use Python, there are some other great static site generators that use Ruby, JavaScript, and other languages.)

I decided to give Pelican a try. It is a commonly used static site generator written in Python. It directly supports reStructuredText and can support Markdown when the required package is installed. All the tasks are performed via command-line interface (CLI) tools, which makes it simple for anyone familiar with the command line. And its simple quickstart CLI tool makes creating a website extremely easy.

In this article, I'll explain how to install Pelican 4, add an article, and change the default theme. (Note: This was all developed on MacOS; it should work the same using any flavor of Unix/Linux, but I don't have a Windows host to test on.)