Growing Thoughts - Articles

This Site

2025-05-07T00:00:00+02:00

This site is generated as a static site with the Debian stable package of Pelican. I created my own custom theme for it with Bootstrap 5.

My First Steps with Pelican

I started with the Quickstart tutorial and played with the minimal site you generate there. Not having defined a theme, the pure html output was pretty bare:

The Quickstart tutorial shows the steps to generate and preview a site once. If you start playing around with articles and Markdown and such you probably don't want to run the

pelican content
pelican --listen

commands every time. The make devserver command is much handier. It will re-generate and re-serve the site on http://127.0.0.1:8000 with every file change.

Next, I looked through the Pelican included themes, but nothing really jumped out at me... So I got curious about customizing my own theme.

Adding a Custom Theme

The Pelican docs suggest to build your own theme with their simple theme. To add the theme to your site download the simple theme's folder from the GitHub repository into a subfolder, e.g., your-site/theme/.

To enable the theme in your builds add the below setting to your pelicanconf.py. It takes the relative path to the theme's subfolder.

THEME = 'theme/'

The simple theme (folder) only contains a templates/ subfolder with .html files. These define a blog structure. All Pelican themes do. Were you now to build your project site again, it would still look very bare. Similar to the screenshot above. As the simple theme doesn't include any CSS.

I didn't have any CSS experience, but have heard a lot about Bootstrap. So, I tried to figure out how to add that to my new theme.

Adding Bootstrap

heise article (german)

Theme Changes

bla

<html lang="{% block html_lang %}{{ DEFAULT_LANG }}{% endblock html_lang %}" 
      data-bs-theme="dark">

Makefile Patch

I patched the rsync command in the Pelican generated Makefile to --exclude 'logs' to avoid warnings with rsync and my webhost. My webhost keeps a logs directory in its document root that rsync tries to delete.

rsync_upload: publish
-   rsync -e "ssh -p $(SSH_PORT)" -P -rvzc --include tags --cvs-exclude --delete "$(OUTPUTDIR)"/ "$(SSH_USER)@$(SSH_HOST):$(SSH_TARGET_DIR)"
+   rsync -e "ssh -p $(SSH_PORT)" -P -rvzc --include tags --cvs-exclude --delete "$(OUTPUTDIR)"/ --exclude 'logs' "$(SSH_USER)@$(SSH_HOST):$(SSH_TARGET_DIR)"

My Visual Studio Code Extensions and Settings

2025-06-27T00:00:00+02:00

My current vscode extensions and settings. Should I ever need them on a new system.

Extensions

Continue set up with Mistral's Codestral
Pylance
Python
Python Debugger

Settings

Color Theme: Solarized Dark
Render Whitespace: trailing
Minimap: disabled

DotA 2 Alt Modifier Set to SPACE Hotkey Issue

2025-05-24T00:00:00+02:00

The just released DotA 2 7.39 gameplay update broke my Alt Modifier hotkey which I bound to SPACE. It kept its function, but opened the shop panel with every press, too. I like using it to see ranges etc., but the shop panel opening and taking a third of your view defeats the purpose.

The problem remained after resetting the hotkeys to defaults. Vaguely remembering a similar issue years ago. I found the probable issue by trying the console command key_listboundkeys, which showed the line:

[Console] [Player 0] : "SPACE" = "toggleshoppanel"

It seems to keep that bind even if the shop is bound to another key. Above binding changes if you assign the SPACE key to another function in the menu. But when trying to bind it as the Alt Modifier it goes back to the shop panel. Unbinding it in the console fixes it, i.e., the command:

unbind SPACE

Removes the binding and the Alt Modifier can be set to SPACE in the options menu.

So yay, figured it all out by myself. Felt so proud about it that I reported it as an Issue on the Dota2-Gameplay Github tracker I found during my searches. Only to then find out others had similar issues. :) Some even came up with the same fix. It seems to have helped at least one other guy, though. I'll take that.