A couple of years after I wrote about how happy I was with Blogofile, it stopped being developed. The last update on GitHub was in 2015, the owner has archived the repository, and Blogofile.com doesn't answer anymore.

I looked for forks and didn't find any active ones. So as much as I liked the look and feel of my blog, it was going to have to switch software to something that was supported. I looked at several different options but the only one written in Python that seemed active was Pelican.

Converting the old Blogofile posts to Pelican was pretty straight-forward. Blogofile and Pelican both can't handle the "---" or "+++" that mark the start and end of the post header in standard Markdown.

When I first tried Pelican, I found problems and I didn't know if they were coming from the program itself or the themes. For example, I'd get the name of the post "stuck" as part of the URL, so every link was "/some-blog-post/about" or "/some-blog-post/category/blogging".

Eventually I would learn that this is an ongoing problem with blogging software and themes: presumably the themes worked with the software when they were created but over time they stopped working properly. What I would like is 10 themes that work instead of 100 that might or might not. I'm looking for something that works so I can get familiar with the software. Later, I might want to customize a theme or come up with my own. But Day 1, the writing is hard enough without taking on graphic design, too.

I probably should have left my posts alone, since Pelican seems to handle the mixing of HTML and Markdown as well as Blogofile did. But I converted them to pretty much standard markdown.

I actually got Hugo up and going with another blog before I did Pelican. Basking in that success, I came back to Pelican and tried 6 or 7 themes until I found one that worked. There seems to be a common problem with blogging software: there are (or are not) settings in the config file and that dramatically affects the theme working or not. There isn't a guaranteed configuration that will work with every theme or even most.

I chose the AboutWilson theme because it worked well out of the box.

Deploying with Hugo to Netlify was straight-forward and Pelican was only slightly more complicated.