A teapot, cut in half. Sort of.
I’ve had a mysterious broken page on this site for a while - but been too busy to look into it. My Comprehensive Linux Backups with etckeeper & backupninja article has been refusing to load, and returning a weird HTTP 418 Unused status code instead. I finally made the time to figure out the cause.
It turned out that this was being ...
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This site has been generated using Pelican 3.3 for over two years - and I finally found some time to upgrade to the current version of Pelican, 3.6.3. This is how I did the upgrade.
I decided to be lazy and do the upgrade in-place, instead of creating a new virtualenv and copying the content & settings over. Luckily, this worked out OK, after a bit of fiddling around.
I also decided, rather cavalierly, to upgrade all the packages ...
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There are quite a few changes in Pelican 3.3 - most of them minor, but a few which might mean making some changes to your site in order to upgrade. This is what I did to move my site from Pelican 3.2 to 3.3.
The change that had the biggest impact and took the most work was around image linking - caused by a combination of things. I think I was doing it wrong before and things changed in ...
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Compressing Limited Colour PNG images
Most of the .PNG files on this site are the ‘blueprint’ style diagrams, like this one:
This illustration is a large 5.6MB SVG file, mostly because of the very detailed paisley pattern that I used.
I create these in Inkscape as vector .SVG files & export them to bitmap .PNG files. I then re-compress them, to ensure ...
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How much does a a software bot weigh, anyway?
reddit, the insanely popular internet community, had 71,435,935 unique visitors last month, with over 2,360,783 people logged in [1].
I say people - but it turns out that not all of the denizens of reddit are human. There are also bots. Lots and lots of bots. How many? No-one really knows. [2]
This is ...
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As I mentioned previously, this site was put together using Pelican - a static site generator, written in Python.
Pelecanus Occidentalis - the Brown Pelican.
Static site generators take your content, pour it into your templates and output the result as static pre-generated HTML, CSS, JS & image files. You can then just upload the resulting folder of output to your server and you’re done. All you ...
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