pelican-precompress now supports Python 3.11 and 3.12.

pelican-granular-signals now supports Python 3.11 and 3.12.

pelican-granular-signals now officially supports Python 3.10.

pelican-precompress now officially supports Python 3.10.

pelican-granular-signals will send signals to your plugins at the right time, every time.

pelican-precompress 2.1.0 guarantees that it'll run after your other plugins have generated content. Beat the rush and upgrade now!

pelican_precompress 1.1.1 is now released and features faster compression times.

I've added an XML sitemap to the site.

I imported all of my ancient Wordpress blog entries (2004-2007).

I added a robots.txt file so that a common request won't be greeted by a 404 page.

I've set up HTTPS and redirection for www.kurtmckee.org, and I've enabled automatic certificate renewal.

I've created a Pelican plugin that pre-compresses my static files using gzip, zopfli, and brotli.

I've set up static Brotli compression on my site.

Automatic favicon.ico requests now return HTTP 204 instead of HTTP 404.

I've set up CSS minification and cache busting on the site.

I've enabled TLSv1.3 and caching for the site.

kurtmckee.org now uses HTTP/2, HTTP Strict Transport Security, OCSP stapling, and TLSv1.2. Also, I've set up CAA on my DNS.

Yikes, it's been almost five years since I last posted about moving my blog back to a self-hosted site! Time really flies.

Anyway, my site is up and running again! I've got a lot of important things handled already:

1. The site is encrypted using Let's Encrypt certificates.
2. Entries from LiveJournal …

With basically ten lines of code and a trivial template modification I've added support for multiple categories to Pelican. I'll make the code freely available soon. I expect to finalize the migration soon.

Speaking of which, perhaps I should have called this post series "migration" instead of "moving". I've gotten …

Good news! I have almost 200 blog entries spanning eight years "imported" into Pelican (really, I have almost 200 text files on a USB drive). I've even written code that automatically converts in-blog links from LiveJournal URL's to the new URL scheme. I really need multiple categories, though, in part …

I misspoke, apparently: the Unicode problem in the first tool was stemming from something weird going on with the xmlrpclib.Binary.decode() function. Extracting the raw utf-8 data and decoding that gets me the data I expect. New problem: some of my entries are not fully HTML. The paragraphs are …

Apparently Python-based LiveJournal softwares think they're special snowflakes that don't have to deal with Unicode. The first library created severe corruption and truncation. The second tool immediately crashed because it assumed I was using a Cyrillic locale that was compatible with characters the library's author introduced in the output (and …

I've gotten the site to a decent visual and functional state -- pagination works, categories work, feeds work...it still feels like it's missing something, either a functional or navigational element. Maybe it doesn't feel right simply because I'm unaccustomed to a single-column blog.

Things to improve but that take more …

I'm creating a theme basically from scratch. I have hated web design with a burning passion for over a decade. Bootstrap makes it easier but it is still easily the single most miserable programming I've had to suffer through in years.

At least pagination works. Mostly. With problems. With hard-coded …

It appears Pelican has made a stand against supporting multiple categories. There are two bug reports that I've found where somebody requested support for multiple categories and was told no. This is something I applaud and encourage. Happily, Pelican is open source so I can modify it to support multiple …

This past week I set up a web server and started customizing Pelican, the blog software I expect I'll use to generate the site. I am making some changes to the theme, but after it's functional enough I will begin working to import over 10 years of content.

Having wiped my computer recently and reloaded everything I know now the relief that comes from having good backups of personal data. However, for a few years I've been using online services such as Blogger, LiveJournal, and Tumblr to host my online posts. Over the weekend, I was shocked to …

I've started working to migrate my online presence back to kurtmckee.org; it's been two-and-a-half years since I self-hosted my blog, and in that time I've fragmented my identity across LiveJournal, Blogger, Tumblr, and a smattering of other services including YouTube and Flickr.

Thus far I've upgraded my Wordpress install …

I've been looking at various websites' designs and working to come up with a design that I can call my own. It's slow going, but I've got something that I like just a little bit. Here's a preview of the header:

It kind of reminds me of Half Life, which …

Django has made my web development life easier.

I've been thinking about website design, and what kind of header I would want to have for my website. In the process of doing so, I've worked to identify what I think looks good on other websites, and how I could work to create a similar design.

Here are some …