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.

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:

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 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.

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

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

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 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.

I’ve been in the process of redesigning my blog and so as part of that I’ve tried to make as many pieces as possible installable from pip. To that end, I’ve packaged my website theme and uploaded it to PyPI.