TPC Portfolio and Blog Relaunch

Static blogging using the Python pelican static site generator under the hood. Markdown files under /content/posts and /content/pages are converted to HTML by Pelican as part of a Github Action.

Local development settings are in pelicanconf.py while the live settings are in publishconf.py.

publishconf.py imports everything from pelicanconf.py and overrides the production-specific values (live SITEURL, feeds enabled, DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY = True). You should never need to edit publishconf.py for local dev.

Deployment consists of committing changes to main and pushing up to GitHub.

Running Locally

Quick start (recommended)

cd ~/Documents/work/pelicantpc

# Build once and serve on http://localhost:8000
uv run pelican content -s pelicanconf.py
python -m http.server 8000 --directory output

Auto-rebuild on file changes

# In one terminal: watch and rebuild on every content/template/CSS change
uv run pelican --autoreload -s pelicanconf.py

# In another terminal: serve the output
python -m http.server 8000 --directory output

Or with the Makefile (if pelican is on your PATH):

make devserver  # starts both watcher + HTTP server together

Config files explained

File	Purpose
pelicanconf.py	Local dev — SITEURL = "http://localhost:8000", feeds off
publishconf.py	Production — imports pelicanconf, sets SITEURL = "https://tomclancy.info", feeds on

The GitHub Action runs pelican content -s publishconf.py on push to main.

Themes

Old Book

• Work in progress: we need to split up the article.content so headers can appear properly.
• Need to test footnotes
• Test subheaders and then reformat some docs (plus update Thunderbolt theme)

Thunderbolt

• Will need to be updated for changes above before switching can work

Plugins

All active plugins are listed in pelicanconf.py under PLUGINS.

Plugin	Install	Purpose
plugins.oembed	local (plugins/oembed.py)	Embeds YouTube, Twitter/X, and other oEmbed providers
pelican.plugins.simple_footnotes	PyPI pelican-simple-footnotes	Footnote syntax: [^1: text] renders inline footnotes
pelican.plugins.deadlinks	GitHub (no PyPI release)	Detects broken external links; set DEADLINKS_VALIDATION = True for full HTTP checks

Installing the deadlinks plugin

Because pelican-deadlinks has no PyPI release, it must be installed from GitHub:

uv add "git+https://github.com/pelican-plugins/deadlinks.git"

Running a link audit

Enable validation once, build, then disable again to avoid slowing down normal builds:

# In pelicanconf.py: set DEADLINKS_VALIDATION = True
uv run pelican content -s pelicanconf.py 2>&1 | grep -i dead
# Re-set DEADLINKS_VALIDATION = False when done

TODO

• Markdown linter for consistency between writing environments?

Bonus Points

• oEmbed support in importers: https://micawber.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
  • Not sure if I need it; if so, here's an example content/posts/2013-06-12-parochialism.md
    • problem is there are lots of embedded youtube and similar in things, so it would need some testing
  • Swap ://twitter.com to ://x.com?
  • Add requirement to hook
• Add a tag to any post starting with "Twitter Updates" or just put a "hide" status on them
• Music blogging for favorites -- create a landing page

Portfolio

• Do it in sync with A-Team portfolio rebuild
• Automatically add media from Django if possible, remove things like thumb:1

Improve Blog Posts

• Media consumed posts: podcasts, books, etc

Links

• Pelican docs
• Plugins and repo
• UV docs: Using this as a project to get used to uv