Pelican

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...