Nikola vs Pelican vs Hugo

When building this website for my code blog, I had a look at Pelican, Nikola and Hugo.

After playing around a little with Pelican (which isn't too bad), I went with Nikola because of its native integration with Jupyter Notebooks. In Pelican, working with Jupyter Notebooks is a "hacky fix" using a plugin and requires some tweaks to make it look presentable. I did have a look at Hugo which is at present, the fastest web framework. I like Hugo because its written in Go which was developed by Google, therefore it must be good ;)! However, it does not natively support Jupyter Notebooks. Admittedly, there is Hugo Jupyter plugin, but the last commit was in 2017, so maybe when Hugo becomes more matured and Jupyter Notebooks are more integrated with the framework, I'll consider use it.

I highly recommend Nikola if you're creating a coding blog using Jupyter Notebooks! Otherwise I would use Hugo. The native blogging script for Nikola is reStructuredText which is more powerful, but also more complicated compared to Markdown. Bear in mind that Markdown also works but requires some changes the the conf.py file in the nikola directory.

Markdown is great and I love using it. reStructuredText text definitely got some getting used to. See my cheatsheet as a reference list for Markdown and reStructured Text.