The Wombelix Post - Pelican

Open Graph Support in my Pelican Theme

2025-08-01T00:00:00+02:00

When sharing blog articles on LinkedIn, I noticed they showed The Wombelix Post instead of the actual article titles. After taking a closer look, it seems like social media platforms prefer Open Graph (Archive: [1], [2]) meta tags to generate previews.

I didn't implement these tags when I created my Pelican theme xlii almost 5 years ago. Even though my HTML title contains the individual page and article title as suffix, some platforms only seem to pick up the overall page title and ignore them.

I added Open Graph tags now across all relevant template files using a Jinja2 block-based pattern. The base template includes the Open Graph namespace and default tags for the homepage. Article and page templates override these with content-specific information like title, URL, description, publication date, category, and author.

I also added HTML meta tags with author information and keywords for tag and category pages.

Testing with LinkedIn's Post Inspector confirmed it works. The inspector now shows article titles, descriptions, publication dates, and author information instead of generic site data.

LinkedIn ignores the og:site_name tag and displays the domain name instead. This bothers me a bit since I'd prefer to have my site name included, but I can't change how they interpret the tags. Other platforms like Facebook and Mastodon should behave as expected when they follow the Open Graph specification closer.

Now available as Onion Service through the Tor Network

2022-03-13T00:00:00+01:00

I'm happy to announce that this site is also published as Onion Service from now on, which means a focus on privacy, security, freedom and support for the Tor Project as well as a statement against censorship.

The new Tor URL: http://2xwpdwnzmag3ewobwsdewpor4gmca4d5gltviol3u6upihb6m6m6xaad.onion

Also it was fun to setup ;) To ensure the right URLs are used, I decided to publish two versions, which was quite a simple task by adjusting a few lines in my Pelican configs.

The Tor Service is running on the same FreeBSD Jail as my (static) site and nginx, let me share some technical details.

Installing Tor is straight forward, just run pkg install tor and sysrc tor_enable="YES".

Two lines in /usr/local/etc/tor/torrc are enough to enable a new Onion Hidden Service:

HiddenServiceDir /var/db/tor/keys/<website>/
HiddenServicePort 80 unix:/var/run/tor-<website>.sock

For nginx I adjusted the existing https config to publish the Onion-Location (Archive: [1], [2]) header, which will advertise the .onion URL of this Site to visitors that are using the Tor Browser.

The Onion URL can be found in /var/db/tor/keys/<website>/hostname.

server {
        listen 443 ssl http2;
        # Tor unrelated config omitted
        add_header Onion-Location http://<onion_url>$request_uri;
}

As recommend in the Tor Setup Guide (Archive: [1], [2]) I added an additional server section and use a unix socket to listen for Tor requests.

server {
        listen unix:/var/run/<website>.sock;
        # Tor unrelated config omitted
        server_name <onion_url>;
        root <path_to_web_document_root>;
}

From a Pelican perspective, I created a second publishconf to set the SITEURL to my <onion_url> and adjusted the Makefile a little to upload the regular and the tor version at once.

Following the additions on top of the standard Makefile when installing Pelican.

PUBLISHCONF_TOR=$(BASEDIR)/publishconf_tor.py
SSH_TARGET_DIR_TOR=<path_to_web_document_root>

# Tor unrelated config omitted

rsync_upload_tor: publish_tor
        rsync -e "ssh -p $(SSH_PORT)" -P -rvzc --include tags --cvs-exclude --delete "$(OUTPUTDIR)"/ "$(SSH_USER)@$(SSH_HOST):$(SSH_TARGET_DIR_TOR)"

rsync_upload_all: rsync_upload rsync_upload_tor

Last step was to start the tor service service tor start, apply the new nginx config service nginx reload and to publish the site make rsync_upload_all.

Installing static site generator Pelican inclusive Plugins with pipx

2021-09-25T00:00:00+02:00

Quick one, after re-installing my Notebook, I had to configure lot of things again and I wasn't happy with my earlier Python venv setup.

I was taking a deeper look into pipx and I think that's way easier to use. It just take care about a venv per package that I'm going to install, I don't have to take care about anything on my own.

I tried it and after learning about the inject feature, mentioned by cs01 in a GitHub Issue (Archive: [1], [2]) it was no problem to install Pelican including some Plugins via pipx:

pipx install pelican
pipx inject pelican pelican-pdf
pipx inject pelican markdown
pipx inject pelican pelican-read-more

Pelican Plugin: read-more

2021-04-05T00:00:00+02:00

The read-more Pelican Plugin was the second one I helped to migrate to the new Structure / GitHub Organization.

After a specified length, it adds a "read more" link the the Posts Overview, you can see it on this Blog in action for example.

The Configuration is very easy, the Plugin supports a few Parameter for your pelican.conf File.

It can by installed by running python -m pip install pelican-read-more, the Source is available on https://github.com/pelican-plugins/read-more

Proudly present: My first accepted Pull Request for Pelican

2021-03-03T00:00:00+01:00

As already mentioned in my Post Migration from Wordpress to Pelican the fact that Pelican is written in Python and provide a Plugin system was important for me. So I can adjust the Code and also give something back to the Pelican Community

The Project is moving away from their monolithic Plugin Repository to a separate Organization Namespace were every Plugin has it's own Repository and get published to PyPI.

Due to the fact that i wanted to use the PDF Generator but it wasn't yet migrated, i decided to contribute (Archive: [1], [2]) and assist with updating and migrating this Plugin.

Today I proudly present: My first accepted Pull Request for Pelican (PDF Plugin) (Archive: [1], [2])

There is still room for improvement and i'm working on further fixes and features, but it's a starting Point.

You find at the bottom of every Article and Page a PDF Download Link, the linked PDF file was generated by the mentioned Plugin.

Migration from Wordpress to Pelican

2021-03-01T00:00:00+01:00

A few years ago I setup my personal site based on Wordpress and was quite happy with that. But after some time I wasn't sure anymore if this is really what I want:

First of all I had to take care about updates every few weeks and had always a bad feeling about potential security issues.
Also the Content I added couldn't easy be converted in other Formats neither the Source Code shared without Plugins.
And last but not least, a few Megabyte had to be transfered, multiple Cookies were set and lot of Javascript loaded to read just a short post.

I started looking around and liked the approach to use a static site generator and focus on pure HTML as well CSS.

After some research and testing i decided to go with Pelican, it's Python based and can be extended by Plugins.

So I started to:

Creating a own Theme
Contribute to update and migrate old Plugins I like to use
Migrate content, split across various locations, to reStructuredText

Not finished yet, but as you can see, there were already some progress :)

I plan to publish my Theme shortly as well invest more time in Contributing to the Pelican Project.