We are now finished up the second Christmas season overshadowed by Covid (and hopefully the last!).

On one hand, it provides a nice excuse to stay home and have a quiet holiday. But it’s also been almost two years since we’ve been able to visit some extended family due to border closures. We ended up in the middle: we had some extended family travel this way, and other family gatherings happened, although with several absences due to people in Covid quarantine.

AutoLoader is a plugin for Pelican, a static site generator written in Python.

AutoLoader is a “meta plugin” in that it doesn’t directly affect your Pelican site, but rather works to make your other plugins better. By way of background, Pelican 4.5 added the ability to autoload plugins that exist in the pelican.plugins namespace. This plugin allows you to extend this autoload ability to any arbitrary namespace. In particlar, it defaults to extending this ability to my minchin.pelican.plugins namespace, and thus will autoload my other plugins, if installed. It can also be used to add plugin autoloading to earlier version of Pelican.

So over the weekend as a Hackoberfest project, I decided to update a project that hadn’t been touched in five years.

I’ve just released a groundbreaking version of my website theme Seafoam; I believe this is the first Pelican theme designed to configure itself!

The root of this magic is that the theme has actually been packaged as a namespace plugin for Pelican. If you’re running a sufficiently recent version of Pelican (i.e. v4.5 or newer), Pelican will automatically load the Seafoam plugin; if you’re using an older version of Pelican (or other, non-namespace plugins), you’ll need to add the Seafoam plugin to you configuration:

So this last Friday I got my second Covid vaccine shot!

It’s time for a new update to Seafoam, the website theme currently in use here (on my Blog) and by my wider site.

This post actually covers five releases:

• v1.2.1 doesn’t add any functionality or bugfixes directly, but is designed to point users to the new v2 releases.
• v1.3.0 returned the plugin to the stewardship of Whisky Echo Bravo, who wrote the first versions of this plugin. This is the first version of the plugin available on PyPI as pelican-image-process.
• v2.0.0 reorganized the project codebase to make this work as a “namespace plugin”. Added by Pelican 4.5 is a feature to automatically activate such plugins. This release also fixed a bug with the crop API, and added the ability to create progressive JPEGs and to work within Atom feeds. It also transfers the code repo (and project stewardship) to the Pelican-Plugins organization.
• v2.1.0 adds the ability to copy EXIF data to processed photos.
• v2.1.1 lowers the minimum Pelican version to 3 (from 4.5). Under the hood, it also updates the local development infrastructure to work better on Windows.

So, on Saturday, I ended up getting my first COVID vaccine shot.

This post actually covers three releases:

• v1.1.0 doesn’t add any functionality or bugfixes directly, but is designed to point users to the new v2 releases.
• v2.0.0 reorganized the project codebase to make this work as a “namespace plugin”. Added by Pelican 4.5 is a feature to automatically activate such plugins. It also transfers the code repo to the Pelican-Plugins organization and moved the PyPI package to pelican-jinja-filters.
• v2.1.0 adds two filters — merge_date_url and datetime_from_period. It also lowers the minimum Pelican version to 3 (from 4.5). Under the hood, it also updates the local development infrastructure to work better on Windows.

Git has an handy feature that you can get a system-wide .gitignore file. This is particularly helpful to keep your project .gitignore files lean. However, Git was originally built for Linux and sort of begrudgingly supports Windows, which sometimes leads to oddities (like this):

Where do you put your global .gitignore file on Windows to automatically have it loaded?