Blogging on Sirius Stuff

Clone Themes in Hugo, don't use submodules

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:09:35 +0000

Both Hugo and Netlify will tell you to use submodules when using themes.

That might work for some people but it didn’t work well for me and caused me to stop blogging for years because I didn’t want to/couldn’t figure out the conflicts with Hugo and various themes. Hugo releases come at a relentless pace and is backwards compatible for what seems like only a few versions.

Now Running on Hugo 1.60

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:46:52 -0700

In Siriusventures.com now on Pelican 4.11.0 I talked about upgrading my version of Pelican, which went smoothly, and my concerns about Pelican. I really like the interface of Publii because it’s more like Google Docs, with the ability to easily insert images, refer to links especially internal ones, and just the speed and ease of working with it. I have concerns about Publii. I worked with ChatGPT to try and import my other site, running on Hugo, into Publii. It was no problem getting markdown into the right directory and the articles into the right table. I tried a few times to get other tables right and in the end I just entered the articles by hand. That was OK for 28 or so posts but not fun for more than that.

How to Read Blogs with RSS in 2020

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

How to Read RSS in 2020 is a nice article on how to use RSS.

RSS is a great way to follow people who post longer content on their blogs. You fire up your reader of choice and it pulls in the articles without you having to visit all those websites. If there’s no change, nothing shows up in your newsreader.

Some of the neat uses of RSS to follow someone’s Twitter or Instagram without having to follow them on Instagram have faded away as companies put up walls to keep you on their property.

Moving from Blogofile to Pelican

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 01:01:01 -0700

A couple of years after I wrote about how happy I was with Blogofile, it stopped being developed. The last update on GitHub was in 2015, the owner has archived the repository, and Blogofile.com doesn’t answer anymore.

I looked for forks and didn’t find any active ones. So as much as I liked the look and feel of my blog, it was going to have to switch software to something that was supported. I looked at several different options but the only one written in Python that seemed active was Pelican.

Moving from AWS S3 and Cloudfront to Netlify

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 01:01:01 -0700

After almost 10 years of letting the blog sit, I wanted to bring it into the modern world. One of the issues was that I had last touched the blog back in 2011 when SSL connections were only for transactions. The blog was just fine serving pages at https:// but the rest of the world has moved onto https:// Notice the “s” for HyperText TransPort Secure.

I was able to do that with some work but the biggest problem was that most of my URLs end in / but some didn’t. I was able to find a blog post on how to use Lamdas from AWS called from Cloudfront to handle adding a “/” to requests. But some-url/ and some-url and some-url/index.html were treated differently.

Script to Update Blogofile Blog on Amazon S3

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:00:10 -0700

Because Blogofile(at least the 0.7.1 version I’m using) regenerates every file and directory every time it makes it hard to update just the changed files on Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage System) can scale incredibly high

So I wrote a shell script that updates only the changed files and also pings GooglePing so that Google and other services come along and read your update.

Over time, the difference between what the old page 2 on S3 has and what it should be will build. There’s a simple answer, which is to just upload all of the page files.

What's not perfect with Blogofile

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:00:10 -0700

In Switched from WordPress to Blogofile there are two good things about using Blogofile:

flat files are almost impossible to hack
Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage System) can scale incredibly high

There’s some downsides:

blogofile build seems to copy or regenerate every single file
it’s not totally happy being on S3 - it doesn’t make index.html files for the archive and category directories.
there’s no easy way to post-via-email or send a link to start a post

Right now I’m writing this with vi and that’s far less comfortable than WordPress’s editor which I really liked. But I’m sure I’ll find TextWrangler or something as suitable for writing blog posts.

Switched from WordPress to Blogofile

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:24:10 -0700

I really like WordPress for the huge number of themes and utilities that it has. What I don’t like, though, is the need for constant vigilance to make sure that your blog hasn’t been hacked. When I started the conversion, I found two blog posts that had been secretly altered so that they had links to spam sites. I wasn’t sure whether to be grateful that only two had been altered or disappointed that my blog mattered so little that that’s all they did.

Celebrity Worship and the American Dream

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 06:06:06 -0700

Love this quote from Violent Acres about Celebrity Worship and the American Dream

Speaking of the American dream, has anyone noticed how much it’s changed? The American dream used to be about owning a modest home, having a happy family, and supporting yourself with honest, hard work. No one vies for things like that anymore.

She certainly expresses herself in ways that I wouldn’t. But like the way so many of her posts cut to the heart of things. Recommended reading.

Google Reader Optimized

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 06:06:06 -0700

I’ve been using Google Reader more and more. I’m not thrilled with the layout, so I was really pleased to see that I could modify it either using the Stylish FireFox Extension or via Greasemonkey Google Reader Optimized

I started out with Stylish but am trying to cut down on the number of extensions I have. Of course, whether it’s better to have it as a Greasemonkey script seems more open to problems than an extension. You’re one level away from the scripts and they don’t go through the official Mozilla check-in process.

What I now know about Wordpress 2.1

Sun, 28 Jan 2007 01:01:01 -0700

What I now know about Wordpress 2.1 … is that I can’t run it because my host is running MySQL prior to 4.0. Tried doing the upgrade and it sort of worked … but not really. So I reverted back to 2.0.6 and found 2.0.7 which is what we’re running now. Really have to get credit to the folks at WordPress - they have made a solid piece of software that’s easy enough to work with that many people have made plug-ins … but it handles stuff like 2.0.6->2.1->2.0.7 without messing up. Very comfortable feeling, relying on it.

pingback versus trackback explained

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 03:03:03 -0700

I’ve never really understood the differences between “pingback” and “trackback”.
Google likes to display older articles, which has interesting effects The first thing that I found that tried to explain the differences was published more than 3 years ago and has way more detail than I want. But this whitepaper led me to more resources on pingback and trackback.

If I can summarize:

Pingback

Just ping a blog (or whatever) with your own blogging software
No detail about what you said about them
Receiver doesn’t link back to you

Trackback