Moving this blog to Pelican

Here it is! the new version of this blog. I haven't updated it in over two years but that's hopefully been a function of how annoying it was to put up new posts. I have a few images I've saved in a BLOG photo album so I'll try and catch up with those over the next few months too.

My old blog was served with github pages and Jekyll. I used that since that's what github pages said to use and I could use markdown and the markdown was the same as what was used on github. But it was a total pain in the butt since every time I wanted to add a new post it seemed like I'd have to update GEMs due to some security warnings and it'd take so long to get it up and running and then I had some github-markdown-server integrations with Emacs that allowed me to easily view the page, but it always seemed to not play well with the ruby version manager environment and ugh, it was just awful.

This new blog is served with gitlab pages. I like that gitlab lets me have free private repositories so I can keep the source and history for the blog private while still publishing it here. It's also using pelican which is python based and I feel more comfortable with that. Even though I still have

[global]
break-system-packages = True

in my ~/.config/pip/pip.conf so I still haven't embraced the whole virtual environments thing that I'm supposed to be using.

I also have this in my ~/.screenrc

screen -t Pelican bash -l -i -c "cd ~/src/blog ; make devserver"

Which means that I'm always serving my blog locally so I can edit files and view them right away, easy peasy.

In moving my blog I went through all my old posts and using pelican-redirect and pelican-yaml-metadata which doesn't seem to need to be added to PLUGINS in my pelicanconf.py for some reason I slowly made sure every old post worked. which it sure didn't before. all my old htmh/shtml/php blog posts weren't even showing in the old blog. Not much was lost to humanity during that period but some things which weren't just totally wrong are back in the corpus now.

My RSS feed was another thing that's important to me, and I found out feedburner doesn't really do anything anymore, so I eliminated it. The subscribe via email option I thought it was providing no longer works and no one was using it. In the example pelican project it changes the feed url between local and published blogs, but I worked that out and then I think my rss feed should be good. To avoid all my posts showing up as new posts when they get new <id> values I set FEED_MAX_ITEMS = 1 in pelicanconf.py. I'll try and remember to increase it by 1 every time I post a new entry.

I've never looked at my Google analytics, but there was a thing in the config for me to enter a value so I've put it in the config, maybe one day I'll see something useful there.

The move to pelican has provided a few quality of life improvements for writing posts and I'll list them here:

I can make a directory per post and put the markdown and all the images for that post in the same directory. before images were in a static area and it was super annoying to link to them. This is likely to be the biggest thing encouraging me to post. I might even go through and tidy up the old posts to have directories per post. also all my posts' URLs don't end in html or php or whatever which I find much more tidy and even though they are orgainized with the date (in ISO-8601 YYYY-MM-DD format) the urls don't show that at all.

I also have this new markdown fomatting which I'm adding here so I can remember some of them:

• ==Word== becomes Word
• ++ctrl+alt+delete++ becomes Ctrl+Alt+Del
• ~~Word~~ becomes Word
• Inline code can be highlighted with code as in: import pymdownx; pymdownx.__version__ or var test = 0;
• Emoji can be added with :emoji_name: as in: I have a 😄 here. and here is a 🎉
• Smart symbols are enabled by default

I used to have search, but I can't be bothered adding it so I just changed that search link on the left to send you to google with a site:blog.wtwf.com added to it.

Finally the flex theme I'm using has a little profile picture so I was looking around a for a cool computer cat icon to use and I found this picture at easy-peasy.ai.

I love it so much, the cute orange cat and the programming puns, it's perfect. But it's AI generated and I'm not feeling super good about ai generated art right now so I'm putting it here because I love it, but not using it as the profile picture. That cat in the profile picture is my cat Poppy.

That's it for now. Maybe there will be more posts coming up soon.