Posts

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. ...

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. ...

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.

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. ...

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. ...

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

Really bad performance on my MacBook has been driving me up the wall the past few days. Closing all un-needed programs didn’t help. I ran several Mac utilities on my system, rebooted and so on and so forth. Still no good. There’s 8GB of RAM in my (latest model - fall 2010) white MacBook and that really sped things up when it replaced the stock 2GB. It was very frustrating. ...

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. ...

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.