This is the repository which hosts the code for the Nairobi GNU/Linux Users Group blog. We wanted a fun, nerdy and democratic way to give our community an online presence, so here we are.

In order to build this, you need to have Pelican installed. The easiest way to do this is to use Python virtual environments; virtualenv will work, but we recommended you use virtualenvwrapper (a set of extensions to virtualenv).

For reference, a list of commonly-used distro package names are:

• Arch Linux: python-virtualenvwrapper
• OS X (brew): pyenv-virtualenvwrapper

If your distro isn't listed, you'll have to do a bit of homework (and then make a pull request to fix these docs).

Once you have virtualenvwrapper installed, create a virtual environment to hold Pelican and its dependencies:

mkvirtualenv -p `which python2` nairobilug
workon nairobilug

This creates a virtual environment where Python is explicitly set to version 2, and then activates it. If you want to exit the virtual environment, just type deactivate.

Use pip to install the list of dependencies into your virtual environment:

pip install -r https://raw.github.com/nairobilug/nairobilug.or.ke/master/requirements.txt

The theme we're using, pelican-alchemy, is a "git submodule", which means it is maintained as its own separate git repository (with its own git history, project, etc). Submodules are stored in the .gitmodules file, and we first need to initialize and clone it before we can build.

Navigate to where you've cloned this repo and then:

git submodule init
git submodule update

You only need to do the initialization the first time you build. After that, you can simply use the update command to get the latest submodule changes.

Now that the theme exists, we can build:

pelican content

This takes the Markdown files from the content folder and generates static HTML pages inside the output directory. That's it. No MySQL, no PHP, etc...

You can use any web server to view the generated HTML. For example, Python's built-in simple HTTP server:

cd output
python -m SimpleHTTPServer

And now you should see the blog at: http://localhost:8000

If you're interested in writing a blog post for the site, you need to:

• Fork the repo
• Hack hack hack
• Push the changes to your repo; preferably to a topic branch, like why-i-love-linux
• Make a pull request against the master branch

If you have any questions, drop by #nairobilug on Freenode. Happy blogging!