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:

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.

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.

Version 1.2.0 of the plugin has been released and posted PyPI.

The biggest change this version brings is support for Pelican version 4. Thanks to Nick Perkins for reporting the issue, and to Therry van Neerven for providing a Pull Request I could crib a solution from.

Writing these posts about the new releases is often a little funny because the changes made are often so small that they don’t really feel worthy of their own post, but collectively, they start adding up. So this post actually covers five releases combined: 1.0.3, 1.0.4, 1.1.0, 1.2.0, 1.2.1.

Updating my version of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) reference style for use with the reference manager in Microsoft Word 2013 and 2016.