Web on Sirius Stuff

siriusventures.com is now running on Pelican 4.11.0

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 04:04:04 -0700

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.

Improving Your Website Security with Mozilla Observatory and Netlify

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Welcome to Apple News+

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Using custom fonts on a web page, including internet explorer

Wed, 18 May 2011 11:00:10 -0700

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

Smart Google Reader Subscribe Button

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:12:12 -0700

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.

Google Reader - Colorful List View

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 12:12:12 -0700

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

Web 2.0 how-to design style guide

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 07:07:07 -0700

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.

Official Google Reader Blog - There are people who don't use feed readers?

Thu, 03 May 2007 05:05:05 -0700

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.

Web at work? Use Workfriendly.

Tue, 15 Aug 2006 08:08:08 -0700

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.

Jobster and its slightly ominous title for a jobs site

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 07:07:07 -0700

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.

Great post on web design - Yahoo vs Google

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 06:06:06 -0700

Really liked the article Is Google Badly Designed? on Google Blogoscoped. He talks about the design considerations with Yahoo and Google and their home pages.

I thought it was interesting that Google was viewed as “friendly” because of its simplicity. Clearly Yahoo puts a lot of information on its page but it also feels very corporate.

From what I read, Google is having trouble getting people to use its other features. It’d be interesting to know what to degree this is because they’re not displayed the way that Yahoo’s are …

Changes in home pages for Google & Yahoo

Sat, 03 Jun 2006 06:06:06 -0700

Just ran across two articles showing the graphical changes to the home pages - www.yahoo.com for Yahoo and www.google.com for Google - over the past few years.
It’s neat to see this. One of the things that I find personally frustrating about the real world is driving past a place … and seeing a vacant spot where a building used to be. What was there? I can’t remember.

So it warms some of my neurons to see the old pages and say “Oh, yeah, I remember that …”