In this article I’ll talk about how I automated updating my Pelican-generated blog using a combination of PyPI, Travis-CI, and GitHub pages. This is something that has been in the works since I first switched by blog to Pelican.

…and static site generators more generally.

This is a summary of a presentation on Pelican I presented on May 9, 2016. It covers some of the building blocks of Pelican, and then provides several examples of Pelican in use.

As a personal note, this presentation follows my own path of learning and growth with these technologies. I should note that I’m not a programmer or a web developer by trade; that everything I’ve done with Pelican has been as a part of another job or for personal projects. I hope to show you very practical applications of Pelican, rather than theoretical projects.

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

Image Process let you automate the processing of images based on their class attribute. Use this plugin to minimize the overall page weight and to save you a trip to Gimp or Photoshop each time you include an image in your post.

Image Process also makes it easy to create responsive images using the new HTML5 srcset attribute and <picture> tag. It does this by generating multiple derivative images from one or more sources.

PyPI is the “package index” for Python and a wonderful tool for finding and sharing Python libraries.

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).