I recently wanted to tweak my blog theme a little bit. I made the changes I wanted, re-generated my site, and…nothing changed. After messing with various versions of this sequence, I finally realized that pelican doesn’t recompile themes when you make changes. In the case of my theme, I needed to run compass compile manually, and then pelican picked up the new version.

In retrospect, maybe that should have been obvious, but it wasn’t to me. Hopefully this tip saves somebody else an hour of frustration.