The No Title^® Tech Blog

Going through a moment of change in my life, I have decided to redesign my other website, using Pelican and other open source tools. The older version was starting to look a bit aged, especially on mobile devices, so it seemed like a good idea to start a complete makeover. As they use to say, new year… new website.

Over the last 12 years, I have been blogging almost uninterruptedly about different subjects (mostly on tech stuff), on different platforms and using a variety of devices and applications. First on desktop and laptop computers, and more recently from iPhone and iPad. This year I went on to try something new and decided to create this blog based on Pelican, a static site generator made with Python. And I got the whole process working even from my iPhone, which has become, arguably, my main personal computer. So, how do I publish new content to this blog from my iPhone?

Last week, I told you how I had decided to start building my own (almost pure Python) utility to optimize images for the web. Today I am announcing the first public release of this CLI application. Check it out!

When you want or need a custom tool and you can’t find it, you have two options: you either buy one (or ask someone to build it for you), or you make your own and do the best you can to make it work for you. This week, I decided to start building my own (almost pure Python) utility to optimize images for the web.

Making this website load fast while looking good is one of my goals. But making sure that high resolution images don’t weight more that necessary is not that easy, especially when you’re writing your content on iOS and in Markdown…

When I started this blog, I had a few technical requirements in mind. First of all, I wanted the whole static website build process to be based on Python and to be reproducible both on desktop and on iOS. So, I was very glad to find out I was able to pip install pelican and a few of its dependencies in Pythonista, using StaSh, and get my iPhone to process a bunch of Markdown formatted text files. But then I went on to add features and optimizations that required Pelican plugins. And soon I would get into trouble…