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

Post Stats calculates various statistics about a post and store them in an article.stats dictionary:

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

Optimize Images applies lossless compression on JPEG and PNG images, with no effect on image quality. It uses jpegtran and OptiPNG.

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

Summary allows easy, variable length summaries directly embedded into the body of your articles.

Version 2.0.4 of Seafoam has been released.

Seafoam is the Pelican theme I use for this site, but published to PyPI in the hope that it will be useful to others.

This release changes the name of the project to seafoam from the unwieldy minchin.pelican.themes.minchindotca. It also add support for the Pelican Comment System, removes the need to define Jinja2 filters in your configuration file, updates to Font Awesome v4.7, and several design fixes as well. Code is updated to work with Pelican v3.7 and Jinja v2.9.

I am in the middle of moving my blog over from Blogger to self-hosting it and generating it with Pelican. One of the struggles was what to do with comments. Something like Disqus could work, but the philosophy of externally hosting comments doesn’t seem to jibe very well with the philosophy of a static website, like this one. In the end, I discovered Bernhard Scheirle’s Pelican Comment System! New comments are submitted via a mailto: link (which generates an email to me), and then each comment is stored on the backend as a separate file. The only problem left was how to import my existing comments from Blogger.

Version 2.0.0 of Colourettu has been released.

Colourettu is a Python library I’ve written for dealing with colours and “palettes” (groups of colours).

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

Jinja Filters provides a selection of functions (called filters) for templates to use when building your website. They are packaged for Pelican, but may prove useful for other projects that make use of Jinja2.

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

CName creates a CNAME file in the root of your output directory. This is useful when you are publishing your site to GitHub Pages on a custom domain.

I just finished redesigning my blog and moving it from one backend provider to another. Another post will follow with the technical discussion of the steps involved, but for this post I wanted to focus on the philosophical considerations.

This update was the final touches needed to make my site go live.