It's been a few weeks that I switched my blog to Pelican, a static site generator build with Python. A number of adjustments have been made since, which I'll happily talk about.

The full article view on index page

One of the features I wanted was to have my latest blog post to be fully readable from the front page (called the index page within Pelican). Sadly, I could not find a plugin of setting that would do this, but I did find a plugin that I can use to work around this: the summary plugin.

Enabling the plugin was a breeze. Extract the plugin sources in the plugin/ folder, and enable it in pelicanconf.py:

PLUGINS = [..., 'summary']

With this plug-in, articles can use inline comments to tell the system at which point the summary of the article stops. Usually, the summary (which is displayed on index pages) is a first paragraph (or set of paragraphs). What I do is I now manually set the summmary to the entire blog post for the latest post, and adjust later when a new post comes up.

It might be some manual labour, but it fits nicely and doesn't hack around in the code too much.

Commenting with Disqus

I had some remarks that the Disqus integration is not as intuitive as expected. Some readers had difficulties finding out how to comment as a guest (without the need to log on through popular social media or through Disqus itself).

Agreed, it is not easy to see at first sight that people need to start typing their name in the Or sign up with disqus before they can select I'd rather post as guest. As I don't have any way of controlling the format and rendered code with Disqus, I updated the theme a bit to add in two paragraphs on commenting. The first paragraph tells how to comment as guest.

The second paragraph for now informs readers that non-verified comments are put in the moderation queue. Once I get a feeling of how the spam and bots act on the commenting system, I will adjust the filters and also allow guest comments to be readily accessible (no moderation queue). Give it a few more weeks to get myself settled and I'll adjust it.

If the performance of the site is slowed down due to the Disqus javascripts: both Firefox (excuse me, Aurora) and Chromium have this at the initial load. Later, the scripts are properly cached and load in relatively fast (a quick test shows all pages I tried load in less than 2 seconds - WordPress was at 4). And if you're not interested in commenting, then you can even use NoScript or similar plugins to disallow any remote javascript.

Still, I will continue to look at how to make commenting easier. I recently allowed unmoderated comments (unless a number of keywords are added, and comments with links are also put in the moderation queue). If someone knows of another comment-like system that I could integrate I'm happy to hear about it as well.

Search

My issue with Tipue Search has been fixed by reverting a change in tipue_search.py (the plugin) where the URL was assigned to the loc key instead of url. It is probably a mismatch between the plugin and the theme (the change of the key was done in May in Tipue Search itself).

With this minor issue changed, the search capabilities are back on track on my blog. Enabling is was a matter of:

PLUGINS = [..., `tipue_search`]
DIRECT_TEMPLATES = ((..., 'search'))

Tags and categories

WordPress supports multiple categories, but Pelican does not. So I went through the various posts that had multiple categories and decided on a single one. While doing so, I also reduced the categories to a small set:

• Databases
• Documentation
• Free Software
• Gentoo
• Misc
• Security
• SELinux

I will try to properly tag all posts so that, if someone is interested in a very particular topic, such as PostgreSQL, he can reach those posts through the tag.