Rambling about more site stuff

2026-06-28T00:00:00-05:00

I’m sick. This is another post about site updates and plans. (I’m still procrastinating on Art Fight aaaaah)

I implemented some of the steps from IndieWebify.Me (web sign in, h-card, h-entry). I got some of the stuff for receiving webmentions setup (based on the info here), but I need to see some more example implementations because I still don’t really get how this works. I’m also going to try sending myself some webmentions to test it.
I did a complete overhaul of the CSS grid layout to fix some issues that had been bothering me. The sidebar is now broken up into individual sections, and the entire layout is more mobile responsive. I used Layoutit! for this and it’s AWESOME holy shit.
Through that redesign, I removed the mobile hamburger menu that I hated. The old hamburger menu I had on my mobile layout was CSS-only, but I learned later that this isn’t very accessible and you should use JavaScript for hidden menus (icr the source for this off the top of my head). With the new design, the navigation section is flattened into a header row on mobile layouts, which requires no JavaScript and imo is more visually interesting. It’s possible this is also not mobile friendly, but I’m not sure how to check. I’ll need to look around for tools to help check accessibiltiy.
I changed the headers on the side sections to be a little more visually interesting
Did some general cleanup, reorganization, etc.
Added some extremely lazy styling for code snippets for this post. It’s hard to make code snippets for a site that’s already using a monospace font, so I’ll have to look for some examples.

Art Gallery + Feed Brainstorming

I think the next big feature I’d like to add is an art gallery. I’m lazy, and if this site gets too complex to manage I know I’ll stop using it, so I need the process for organizing and sharing the art to be simple and utilize Pelican’s existing features as much possible. I’m not sure if there are any Pelican plugins out there for this—and I will check—but I’d prefer not to use a plugin if possible.

The first thing I’m going to try is creating markdown files under content/articles/art/ for each artwork in the gallery. content/articles/ is where I normally store blog posts, and with my current config setup the subdirectory name (art/ in this case) will become the post category (another example: an uncategorized post like this one goes under content/articles/uncategorized/, and yes I had to explicitly make “uncategorized” a category).

Normally these blog posts have some yaml like this (this is the actual yaml for this post):

---
Title: "Rambling about more site stuff"
Author: Pear
Date: 6/28/26
Tags:
    - Meta
    - Tech
---

But you can basically add any metadata here. Some of the stuff you can add here will be understood by Pelican (like the “tag” entries here are turned into tag pages) but if you add custom fields here you can access and display those in the jinja template. So what I’m thinking is I could do something like this (and this may not be syntactically correct):

---
Title: Whatever the art is titled idk
Author: Pear
Date: 1/1/26
Summary: Summary??
Template: art
Thumbnail: thumbnail.png
Images:
    - file_name_1.png
    - file_name_2.png
Alt:
    - Alt text 1
    - Alt text 2
Tags:
    - Example tag
    - Another example tag
---

I could have a custom art template configured here (Template: art—Pelican will understand this is an override of the default blog post template) and that custom art template could display the images under the Images tag along with the corresponding alt text under Alt (or maybe there’s a better way of formatting this). This would let me have posts with individual images and posts with multiple images (comics, sketchbook stuff). Lastly, I could use Thumbnail to display a smaller thumbnail preview in the gallery.

If this works, the benefits of this setup are:

I can use automation to update the gallery HTML instead of manually writing changes (re: I’m lazy).
I can use Pelican’s built-in filtering for blog posts to filter and display anything under the “art” category—this would be used for the automated gallery updates, but I can use this outside of the gallery page.
I can include new art in my atom feed and have an art only feed.

Some other future changes I’m considering

Anticlimactic to put this after my art gallery idea but whatever

OC pages (I was hoping to do this for Art Fight but I think it’s too late now)
Shrine pages for media/characters I like? And maybe my cat
Guestbook?? I’m too intimidated to set one up right now but I hope to in the future once I have more stuff on here. I was looking at Atabook but now I’m wondering if I can use webmentions for this?

Okay that’s it I’M SO TIRED OF COUGHING AND SNEEZING

I styled my web feed (while I still can)

2026-06-24T00:00:00-05:00

This is my first UNCATEGORIZED blog post! Not one of my weekly update posts!

A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon this post by Cassidy Williams (cassidoo.co) explaining how you can style an RSS/Atom feed using XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) and was immediately intrigued. Since I’m procrastinating on Art Fight (whoops) I decided to take some time to style my web feed and wanted to make a blog post about the process and results.

I started by copying the XSL that Cassidy uses for her blog into my theme directory. Since she uses Astro and I use Pelican, I wasn’t able to copy her instructions for applying the XSL to my feed; fortunately, I found another Pelican user, Daniel, who’d already gone through this process, created a Pelican plugin, and made a blog post about how to use it. I installed the plugin and quickly got things working.

Except! The XSL I’d copied from Cassidy didn’t work right out of the box. The HTML elements and CSS from the XSL were displaying correctly, but the template wasn’t displaying any of my feed items. I compared her template with the template in Daniel’s blog post and realized it was because the syntax for selecting the feed attributes is different between Atom and RSS, which makes sense. I was able to copy Daniel’s example to get my feed items to display. Now it was time to add STYLING!

While brainstorming ideas for my site’s design (which is pretty basic right now and will hopefully evolve over time) I had taken inspiration from the works of William Morris. I like how the Arts and Crafts style feels elegant, cozy, grounded, and organic all at the same time, and I love the colors and natural elements in Morris’s work specifically. (I have some peel and stick wallpaper of one of his patterns in my apartment! Which I paid way too much money for but god it looks so fucking good in my entryway.) His art is in the public domain, so I had the idea to take the leafy frame from this art of his and change it up a little to make a frame for the explanatory text for my feed. I was worried the asymmetry of it would look weird, but I dunno, I like it!

Once this was done, I decided to make a “feeds” page to display the available feeds for my blog and replaced the “subscribe” link with a link to this new page. And that’s it! You can see it and the links to my feeds here.

But this blog post isn’t over yet. I noticed after doing all of this work that Mozilla is planning to remove XSLT support from Firefox (and Google is doing the same for Chrome), so this styling will abruptly stop working in the near future. :( When that happens, I may try out some alternatives. Or just go back to un-styled XML. Who knows. For now though, I really like it!

Pearbosc - uncategorized

Rambling about more site stuff

Art Gallery + Feed Brainstorming

Some other future changes I’m considering

I styled my web feed (while I still can)