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?

So it’s almost exactly 11 months since the first Covid restrictions were implemented…. It’s getting long enough that “last year” will soon stop referring to “normal” times.

So my Honey and the kids got their Covid test back: negative. But, odd to me at least, they’ve been asked to continue to isolate for the rest of the original two week isolation period.

So normal went out the window pretty fast. After two and a half weeks of school (i.e. “normality”) my Honey and some of the kids are at home, being asked to isolate for the next two weeks. It turns out one of the other kids at the daycare tested positive for Covid.