This article is about Pelican¹, a static site generator, and about customising it's theme.

A few days ago I received a e-mail asking me about the theme of this blog and especially how it handles translations of articles:

If there are no translations:

If there are translations:

Pelican it self already supports translations and a simple method to select the language:

1
2
3
4

<!-- Jinja Theme -->
{% for translation in article.translations %}
    <a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ translation.url }}">{{ translation.lang }}</a>
{% endfor %}

The problem with this snippet is that it only outputs country codes (en, de, …) instead of full language …

If you want to prevent search engine robots to crawl certain pages or articles (like your impressum) you basically have two options:

1. robots.txt
2. noindex HTML meta tag

robots.txt

Since there are already tons of tutorials and articles about how a robots.txt works or how you write one, I'll skip this here. If you want more information visit robotstxt.org/robotstxt.

How to use a robots.txt with Pelican¹

First you have to create your robots.txt and save it to content/extra/robots.txt. Then you tell Pelican to simply copy your robots.txt to the …

You also forget to update the copyright year on your Pelican¹ website?

Use a custom variable to always get the current year on a site rebuild.

Theme:

1

<p>Copyright © {{ CURRENTYEAR }}</p>

pelicanconf.py:

1
2

from datetime import date
CURRENTYEAR = date.today().year

Of course you disabled the direct root login on your ssh server (sshd_config: PermitRootLogin no) and set a really secure root password, like a long randomly generated string. In hindsight, maybe something like xkcd: Password Strength would have been better?

So now every time you need root access to your server (Which is nearly all the time I execute the ssh command manually) you do following:

1. Login as a unprivileged user.
2. Search for the root password.
   • It's in your brain? Awesome. Quit reading! (I hope it's an "xkcd password" and not a trivial one :p)
   • It's somewhere written down / stored …

Finally I found some time to set up a Let’s Encrypt certificate for this server.

It's damn easy, even if you dislike Let’s Encrypts Apache auto configuration or web server downtimes.

Auto configuration

To prevent Let’s Encrypt to mess with any of our configuration we will only run it in certonly mode.

No Downtimes

Let’s Encrypts validates with so called acme-challenges that the server requesting a certificate is also legitimate to do so.

Let's say you request a certificate for example.com then Let’s Encrypts will look at http://example.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/ for …

A few days ago I decided that I want to run my own XMPP (jabber) server. Since I don't want to have another user database I searched for a solution to reuse my current e-mail database.

Luckily dovecot (my e-mail deamon) already supports this. Dovecot has a feature called SASL which allows other software to ask dovecot if a given user name and password is valid.

ejabberd

I first tried ejabberd (Community). Ejabberd does not support dovecot SASL by itself, but there are external scripts to authenticate users. There also is already a perl script which uses dovecot, but it …