It has been about a year since I started using a virtual server on the laptop to locally host my blogging efforts with Pelican. Up to now I have used a combination of Vagrant (with Virtualbox in the background) and a Puppet built CentOS VM. At work we are increasingly introducing the concept of containerised services in the form of Docker containers, and I felt that revisiting my blogging setup with a view to making use of a container would be a great way of getting to know the technology a little better.

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I have been running a little while now and am always in the habit of taking my phone with me to get some monitoring in on my progress with the aid of GPS and so on. I have been using a really nice app called mapmyrun. It has given me months of good service and what with the moderate amount of running I have done, I have committed a fair few hours worth of data online.

Meanwhile I have decided that it would be great to get out running with a group of people rather than on my own all the time, so I have joined up with a very friendly local running group in Caistor, Lincolnshire. Quite a number of them use a different app called Strava, and I thought that I would give it a go based on some positive recommendations from members of the group.

You might wonder what this article is doing in the software section of this site... well, read on.

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This is a brief memory aid for me with some small, and perhaps useful, tips when writing articles using reStructuredText [1]. I am aiming to keep on top of this document and maintain it as a living thing; when I find something new and useful, it will be appended.

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This brief article focuses on only one part of using Pelican as a static site generation tool - the day to day usage once the set up is established. There are loads of really good articles on how to get started with Pelican and I am not about to add to that growing pile; there is just no need.

I don't use the default make tool that comes with Pelican, because having a Python programming background made me feel much more comfortable with utilising the ever excellent Fabric tool.

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As a rather inexperienced writer, it is the little things I struggle with, as well as the big things you might add. I find that one of the most annoying is getting title case correct. There are a lot of style guides about which may or may not help; I find some of them cryptic at times, and rather than being strict rules, they seem to be more matters of style. Until recently I had been taking style advice from yourdictionary.com's site, but I always found having to undertake this task manually a bit of a bore.

However, as with most programmers (or even ex-programmers like myself), I find that as soon as I am faced with a repetetive task I look to find a way of automating it; and thus it happened with this. Five minutes later and I had turned up Pat Pannuto's Python based titlecase package.

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I've been making a slow but steady stream of improvements to the blog this year which began with a migration from an ancient installation of Wordpress to the static Pelican HTML site generator. Many other blogs explain how this is achieved so I won't bore you with it here.

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