So, in my current quest of reducing the ads around me, I realized my blog hosted at wordpress.com was full of them.

So I decided to move to Alexis' Pelican blog system : http://pelican.notmyidea.org

Pelican creates a static html blog using reStructuredText or Markdown files and that makes it easy enough to push blog entries at github and have them published automatically on a server.

Pelican can work by default with Disqus and has a default CSS that's simple and readable.

What I am losing from Wordpress is the whole Dashboard that I really liked, and in particular the stats. Knowing that one of my blog post made it to Reddit or hacker news was a good thing -- I could go there and answer questions or read the comments.

I almost got myself a pro account at wordpress because I did not want to maintain yet another stats tool on my server. But getting away from wordpress and getting back under my own domain was more tempting.

Pelican has an import feature for Wordpress, that failed to produce the proper reStructuredText for me, but worked quite well with Markdown.

I was also able to tweak the URLs so they would look exactly like the Wordpress ones, that is, URL with the year, month and day. I was also lucky enough about the slug part of the URL: the import generated the same slugs than Wordpress ! In other words a simple redirection of the domain does the trick to avoid losing any indexing.

I am paying 12 bucks to wordpress to get this redirect but that's worth it because people hitting tarekziade.wordpress.com should find back the result transparently on blog.ziade.org.

I also missed a way to create static pages, like what Wordpress has. So I added this feature to Pelican and will propose it for inclusion to Alexis.

Overall I really recommend Pelican. It's well crafted, easy to use and it's Python !

Thanks to Alexis and other contributors.