Web

I had tried upgrading Pelican once or twice over the years and had problems that I don’t remember anymore. Today it went surprisingly smoothly but instead of starting with my existing setup, I installed Pelican 4.11.0 using uv to a new directory, then copied over my markdown files. I edited the new pelicanconf.py file with a few things from the old one and we were up and running. The toughest part was getting Netlify to stop looking for Python 3.7. More on that in the next article. ...

Mozilla Observatory will test your website and assign it a letter grade based on how well your website implements things like implementing a good Content-Security-Policy, blocking clickjacking, enforcing HTTP Strict Transport Security, and so on. When I started, this blog was rated F. After a few changes, it’s now rated at B+ and I’m heading for A+. One of my other blogs started at A and became A+. That’s because the other blog uses Hugo and a very recent theme. ...

I’ve been using Gmail with the setting for “Display Images” set to off. It helps cut down on tracking and it cuts down on the visual clutter so I scan quickly. I got free 4 months of Apple News+ for buying a new Apple Pencil and I activated it. This is the message that Apple sent me: Apple makes a lot of how they’ve improved accessiblity and rightfully so. But this is not very good for the visually impaired, Apple.

Making CSS Custom Font works with IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari has a clear explanation of how to use custom fonts on your site.

If you’re like most people, you’ve got more feeds in your news reader than you can keep up with. What’s neat about this script is that it not only makes it easy to subscribe but also shows you if it’s already in your subscription list. If it is, it’s shown with a checkmark over the RSS icon. My only objection is that it’s not posted to UserScripts, a central repository for Greasemonkey scripts. ...

If you’re like me and like to read your feeds sorted by tags, you’ll find yourself jumping from blog to blog. Some Greasemonkey styles for Google Reader drop the feed name to save space, making it hard to tell articles apart. Color is an efficient way to cue people that things are changing. Unless you’re color-blind, I guess. But since I’m not, I appreciate the Google Reader - Colorful List View script because it makes it simple to tell that there’s different feeds. Note: updated to show correct script

This seemed like a great article on how to develop modern-looking pages. I barely know some of the HTML tags but Web 2.0 how-to design style guide was clear with great screenshots.

Do you use Google Reader? I’ve thought that other readers were better beause they’re faster. I really like RSS Owl, which uses IE to display pages. It’s based on Java and is cross-platform, usable on Macs, Windows and Linux. It uses one file to track what feeds you read. Problem is, there’s no standard way to show how far you’ve read in a newsfeed. Articles are updated, the online services fetch them at different times - Google and Bloglines are online all the time but your RSS reader probably is not. So I can’t easily keep offline readers in sync unless they’re hooked up to something to like FeedDemon. ...

Browsing at work and don’t want people to know? workFRIENDLY makes your browser look like Microsoft Word. Hopefully you don’t need to use this but nice implementation.

Pete Cashmore of Mashable writes that Jobster has relaunched as a social networking site for job seeking. Theory is that you can connect with people and add faves. You can add tags to other users, which has interesting implications: who’s going to be the first to be labeled “brown noser”? “Meet Your Future” is their slogan, which has Big Brother-ish overtones to me. Though I suppose they don’t actually have pictures of a McDonald’s fryer or a Wal-Mart cash register. ...