I am trying to set up Pelican here.

Edit: The setup process was so much easier than Octopress that I could complete manual migration in less than half an hour.

Thanks to the plugins and theme support, everything that a blogger might need is simply battery included.

So here is a list of resources that I found indispensable:

1. Octopress theme

The readablity and functionality offered by this minimalist theme is brilliant.

2. Social Media Integration

The configuration files pelicanconf.py and publishconf.py have ample variables for linking with the popular social media platforms - Facebook, Twitter, G+.

3. Google Analytics

Open Source bloggers can use this to track hits and get visual visits-with-time feedback.

4. Markdown

I like this typesetting format for multiple reasons - touchtyping friendly characters, frugal use of tags, expressiveness, and the LaTeX-like non-WYSIWYG nature.

In a significant bandwidth-saving move, the MOOC organization Coursera removed the downloadable links from its course videos page. Here are the implications:

Earlier

Use the DownThemAll Firefox plugin/coursera-dl/wget to get all links to all course videos and start downloading.

Current Scenario

The student has to take a scattershot approach through the UI maze to reach the online video player. There is no single page with all downloadable links.

How does this affect the MOOC user?

1. Courses will be chosen wisely
2. Watch only what you need.
3. Salvaged Bandwidth - content loads faster

Workaround

I am trying to learn and use the Python-based parsing library BeautifulSoup to parse the html pages and extract the video links at one place so that the tools like DownThemAll become instrumental to this end again.

It’s only a matter of time that this impending inconvenience be resolved - await the nifty hacks!

Till then, Ta!