This is my first post on my experience with using Nikola. I have been thinking about migrating my current blog from Jekyll to something Python based. This is because I am more familiar with python than Ruby. Since my internship last year, I have been exposed to Python and I really like it.

As for static site generators, I have come across the following,

• Pelican (Most starred python static gen)

• Lektor (Have heard before)

• Nikola (New, I think)

I tried Pelican but I found it lacking in terms of documentations and tools. The build scripts are also rather weird. Pelican uses a makefile to build the site and serve, which makes it harder for me to use on a Windows machine.

Also I wanted to give Lektor a try as well but I ended up going with Nikola instead. I really love the simplicity of the build/serve tool. Also installing theme/plugin is easy. The only trouble I had was running a Jekyll to Nikola post migration tool. Nevertheless, I manually ported my posts, which are in the 20s.

And I really love the fact that it supports multiple templating engine as well as markdown and restructured text for writing posts. After I finished porting, I came to appreciate the elegance of restructured text. It can be confusing at first. Thankfully, I found this cheatsheet which teaches me all the fundamental stuff I need to port my posts.

There is one nice feature that I like that Nikola offers, which is reloading of my browser whenever the page has changed. I think this is a rather neat feature where the pages will just hot reload rather than having to reload manually.

For this blog, I am currently using the Hack theme hosted at Nikola Theme.