Emma's Blog - meta

Revamping my blog... again

Emma Smith — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:00:00 -0700

Background

Well, I've succumbed to the ever-present urge to completely change one's blog setup. It all started when I wanted to add my blog to the Awesome PyLadies' blogs repo. As part of the configuration you can add your blog's RSS feed (structured information about a blog's contents). But the configuration says:

if you wish to have your blog posts being promoted by the Mastodon bot; the RSS feed should be for Python-related posts

My previous blog generator was zola, which worked really well and was easy to set up! However, zola does not support per-tag (or "taxonomy" as zola calls them) feeds. I considered contributing support for this to zola, but I figured I'd look around at other static site generators and see what they support. My blog content is just a bunch of Markdown files after all, so it should be easy to move to another static site generator!

Yak shaving, for fun and profit

I came across Pelican, which was really appealing for a few reasons. First, it supported per-feed RSS feeds. But also, it is written in Python and I felt like it would be fitting since I am a Pythonista. So I decided I would try to port my blog to Pelican. As you may be able to tell by looking at the footer, I did so successfully :)

Setting up Pelican is actually super easy. I installed pelican with markdown support by running uv tool install pelican[markdown] and ran pelican-quickstart to set up a project. After answering a few prompts, I had a full project set up and could copy over the Markdown files used to write this blog. After changing the metadata from zola's format to Pelican's, I had a blog generated... with no theme.

Oh... I needed to see what themes were available. Fortunately Pelican makes this easy by going to the pelicanthemes.com website. That site has a number of community authored themes. Unfortunately, I didn't see any themes I loved.

Introducing pelican-theme-terminimal

So, I did the only natural thing to do and ported the zola theme I was using to Pelican. Fortunately, this wasn't actually too bad. Zola uses Tera for its templates, which is based on Jinja2, which is what Pelican uses. So for the most part I could minimally update the variables used and get the theme ported over easily. The layout between the two is slightly different so I had to restructure how things are designed, but overall it was pretty easy and enjoyable.

You can check out the theme's code here. I don't plan on working on the theme a ton more, mostly just to add features or customizations I want, but it is open source if anyone else wants to use it or submit patches.

The top priorities I have to work on are:

Links to RSS feeds
Mastodon verification

So yeah, my blog is now running on Pelican and Python 🎉

I have a few ideas to blog about over the next week or two so check back soon, or subscribe to my RSS feed.

Introducing the real me!

Emma Smith — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0800

I'm really excited for the opportunity to introduce my true self. A while back I began exploring my gender expression, and today marks an important step in my journey. So let me re-introduce myself, the real me this time.

Hi! 👋 I'm Emma, a trans woman. I use she/her pronouns.

I'm the same person, just more... me! So all the stuff in About Me is still true! Expect more posts about Python, packaging, and whatever other hobby projects I have going on.

Finally, I'd like to thank my wife and everyone who has supported me on this journey so far. I feel so lucky to be surrounded by so many supportive friends and family members. I absolutely could not have gotten this far without them.

Revamping my blog

Emma Smith — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0800

Well, I've decided I want to blog a bit more, in part thanks to Simon Willison's post suggesting keeping a blog is a good idea.

I've changed the UI a bit and I am now publishing via a Github action (I now just need to write a markdown file and push to a git repo!). I hope making it easier to blog will hopefully mean I blog a bit more.

One slight issue I ran into is I would push a commit, then my website would go down. The custom domain setting in Github pages would be reset to empty. At first, I thought this was a bug, how could this get reset so frequently! Turns out Github ties the custom domain to a file named CNAME in the root of the gh-pages branch (or whatever you configure to publish in the settings). I've now set that as a static asset to be included in the root so I won't run into this problem, but rather annoying behavior, my git repo shouldn't be used to store configuration!