The No Title^® Tech Blog

Python is an amazing language that can be both forgiving for beginners and still provide more and more advanced features as we dig through. Sometimes, you hear or read about some of its powerfull tools, and you feel that you have nothing to use it on. But one day that time comes, and you realise that it can make things easier, more readable or more performant. Generators are one of those nice little things.

Since I started discovering Python about two years ago, my learning path has been made of a lot of small steps. And today was no exception (no Python pun intended).

While working on this website, I had the curiosity to find out how many HTML and image files Pelican was generating behind the scenes. I had no utility at hand to count files recursively through folders and subfolders, so I decided to create my own using Python.

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…

One day you find yourself in a situation you need to set up an automatic backup system and you realise that your old server does not support Dropbox anymore. The sollution: getting your hands to work and write a program for that task.

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…