cat /dev/brain

Pelican

I'm the kind of person who often fidgets with the appearance of the things I use. For example, over the course of a few weeks, I constantly changed the configuration file for wmii. I finally got it just right and haven't changed much since (except for the font). I've also changed the default colorscheme for pentadactyl a few times. I can't explain why I do this, but a large part is probably "because I can".

More recently, I've been fidgiting with the themes for this blog. Namely, I've been trying out themes from the pelican-themes repository on GitHub. The one theme I have installed, tuxlite_tbs, was updated. My first instinct was that the pelican-themes command might have an upgrade/update option for a theme. When I noticed it didn't, I was about to dig in and make one, until I realized I that it was already implemented, just not in a documented fashion.

Updating a Pelican Theme (Now)

Let's assume that you have cloned the pelican-themes repository. If not you can simply run:

$ git clone git://github.com/ametaireau/pelican-themes.git
$ cd pelican-themes

Let's also assume that you already have one of the themes installed, e.g., tuxlite_tbs or dev-random. If you want to upgrade the theme, you simply run:

$ pelican-themes -r tuxlite_tbs -i tuxlite_tbs/
# OR:
$ pelican-themes -r dev-random -i dev-random/

Simple enough, right?

Updating a Pelican Theme (Hopefully soon)

Sure that's simple, but it isn't obvious. That is why I just submitted my pull request. It simplifies upgrading a theme by adding a -U/--upgrade option and using the existing functions to cleverly upgrade a theme. It's a simple diff and should be easy for anyone to parse.

My settings.py

And while I'm talking about pelican, I might as well post my settings.py file for it. My git directory structure is:

blog/
blog/rest/
blog/html/
blog/settings.py

And this is my settings.py:

AUTHOR = 'Ian Cordasco'
SITENAME = 'cat /dev/brain'
SITEURL = 'http://www.coglib.com/~icordasc/blog'
TIMEZONE = 'America/New_York'
ARTICLE_PERMALINK_STRUCTURE = '/%Y/%m/'

PDF_GENERATOR = False

FEED_RSS = 'feeds/all.rss.xml'

MENUITEMS = (
        ('Home', 'http://www.coglib.com/~icordasc'),
        ('Resume', 'http://www.coglib.com/~icordasc/index.php?p=resume'),
        ('Colophon', 'http://www.coglib.com/~icordasc/index.php?p=colophon'),
        ('Contact', 'http://www.coglib.com/~icordasc/index.php?p=contact'),
        ('Grimoire', 'http://www.coglib.com/~icordasc/grimoire.php'),
        )

LINKS = (
     ('EFF', 'https://www.eff.org/'),
     ('Slackware', 'http://www.slackware.com'),
     ('wmii', 'https://code.google.com/p/wmii'),
     ('pelican', 'https://github.com/ametaireau/pelican'),
     ('tuxlite_tbs', 'https://github.com/ametaireau/pelican-themes'),
    )

SOCIAL = (
        ('Github', 'https://github.com/sigmavirus24'),
        ('Gitorious', 'https://gitorious.org/~graffatcolmingov'),
        ('BitBucket', 'https://bitbucket.org/icordasc'),
        )

PATH = 'rest/'
OUTPUT_PATH = 'html/'

MARKUP = ['rst']
THEME = 'tuxlite_tbs'
DEFAULT_PAGINATION = 10