For the past year or so, I have been using Jekyll to maintain my site on GitHub which was just a simple single page with details about me, my projects, and skills (which I never updated.) So as someone using Python for every menial task, I set out to check some static site generators in Python. And so, I stumbled upon Nikola and Pelican.

Why Nikola and not Pelican?

Now that I had two options, I started reading up on which was preferred and why people had chosen one over the other. There are numerous sites which state speed and features comparing them so I will not go into that. So when I was searching for both, it was evident that Pelican is popular and widely used than Nikola, and so, obviously Pelican had better support and documentation. So I tried out Pelican with random posts generated and did the same with Nikola. On a quick glance of the config files, I found that Nikola gives so much control and options as compared to Pelican. Having many options and being not popular kind of made me want to contribute to the development of Nikola in some way.

Too many options, a bane?

At times, it might happen that having so many options to use can be overwhelming. And this is what happened to me, because for a moment I never understood what exactly half of them meant. So I went through the documentation a few times and even then I couldn't understand things. And finally, I gave up and decided to ask the developers on their Google Groups and before I knew it one of the developers responded and explained my queries.

So what should you use?

Honestly, try both and use what fits your needs. I didn't quite find the proper themes in Pelican. This could have been an opportunity to create a theme, however I am not a design guy, so that's also a reason for me to prefer Nikola where I liked a theme and it fit right in. The one you see on this site is a heavily modified version of the original lanyon theme for Jekyll. If you like this you can check out my sources on GitHub at the following repositories:

1. Nikola source config
2. Original Lanyon demo
3. Modified Lanyon source