JPoser/Blog

After a couple of months of dreaming, planning and waiting for parts to ship from China I have a complete quadcopter! It flies and everything. Its a small Diatone fpv250 minus the fpv (first person view) and was actually very easy to put together. I zip tied it together over a long hot saturday at the London Hackspace and have spent the remaining weeks trying to find time and space to fly.

This like all the best blog posts is named after a spreadsheet. Quadcopter_dreams is a list of parts and prices to build my third Quadcopter.

With Pelican installed and configured the final couple of tasks are sorting out the design and posting content to your site. Thankfully Pelican makes both of these really easy. Themes are handled by the excellent Pelican Themes git repository and submitting content is as simple as write, build and push. Write a post in Markdown. Tell pelican to build your site, and then push it to your web server.

I've posted on why I picked Pelican as a static blog generator but now I'm going to get into the nuts and bolts of how to use it. It does require you not be afraid to edit configuration files, and a little knowledge of Python and markup languages will go a long way. You will also need a webserver, but if you just want to get your feet wet, there are plenty of free hosting providers you can try out before you fork out for hosting. However if you want to use Pelican hopefully this will be a good introduction.

Up until this one, all the other post have were written before I had a live site. That's because I was umm'ing and arr'ing on what platform and more, specifically what type of platform I'd build it in. I finally settled on a static blogging platform called Pelican. Pelican is a static site generator written in Python. Static site generator's are becoming popular amongst tech bloggers for the advantages they give to those looking to write a small personal page.

I've actually started a number of projects! So far I've got a fair bit to show for them which I'll commit to print in the next few posts. The biggest one I guess is I've set my sites on a career in software development. To this end on advice from fellow nerds (and family) I've signed up on a Java course at City University in London which starts on Friday the 31st.

My name is Joe and firstly I should address my surname, yes I am called Poser. I like mucking about with computers and the internet I have done for as long as I've had access to them however I haven't got much to show for my time with computers other than some decent reflexes and screenshots of a successful Minmus landing in Kerbal Space Program. Neither of those are hugely useful so I've decided I'm going to learn some new skills.