Making This Site (Part II)

Published on: 2020-09-01

So, on I continue with making this site a bit more satisfying. It's one of those nice to get some dub on and just settle into something easy to achieve with minimal brainpower.

Lektor Plugins

lektor-tags

So the first thing I've done is to try and use the lektor-tags plugin, which seems to work pretty well: it really is about just following the README!

A couple of things I've noticed during this is that lektor using server locally does not tell you which plugins actually load or don't load. Even with -vvvv there is no output to tell you that the plugin has loaded or not and because I made a small spelling mistake this became a bit annoying as there was no logging to tell me the plugin in the project didn't load.

lektor-rst

So there's no README for the lektor-rst project which is a shame and once again there is no conclusive information about the success of the load, though it is clear from the virtualenv installation that it installed into the build directory:

$ lektor plugin add lektor-rst
$ lektor server -vvvv
Updating packages in ~/.cache/lektor/packages/3fcdd194880fbf2be796613aee89c221 for project
Collecting lektor-rst==0.2.0
...
Successfully installed ...lektor-rst-0.2.0...

I'm guessing that I can now select rst as a document type for my models which is nice. It's a slight shame that it's mutually exclusive (since all I want to do is have the option), so I wonder if I can implement a checkbox mechanism to experiment with this only in certain posts, or just suck it up and have two fields.

lektor-markdown-header-anchors

So this was interesting, in adding this project we avoid the virtualenv issue with plugins (see below). The full process for this is a lot more lightweight due to utilising this bdist_wheel --universal feature

$ lektor plugin add lektor-markdown-header-anchors
Package lektor-markdown-header-anchors (0.3.1) was added to the project
$ lektor server -vvvv
Updating packages in ~/.cache/lektor/packages/3fcdd194880fbf2be796613aee89c221 for project
Collecting lektor-markdown-header-anchors==0.3.1
  Downloading lektor_markdown_header_anchors-0.3.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl (4.1 kB)
Installing collected packages: lektor-markdown-header-anchors
Successfully installed lektor-markdown-header-anchors-0.3.1
WARNING: Target directory ~/.cache/lektor/packages/3fcdd194880fbf2be796613aee89c221/__pycache__ already exists. Specify --upgrade to force replacement.
 * Project path: ~/.../inconsistentrecords.lektorproject
 * Output path: ~/.cache/lektor/builds/0fdf35440669b574822909b8822e9aa1
 * Running on http://127.0.0.1:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit)

Lektor and virtualenv

I'm very intrigued by the reluctance that Lektor has to optimise for virtualenv installation. Since I generally use virtualenvs or conda for everything I do on my system, having a system managing itself via these mechanisms without letting me manually go about the installation is a negative experience for me.

Another problem with this is after virtualenv installation of packages the overhead in the lektor/packages directory is pretty high.

[ ... ~/.cache/lektor/packages ]$ du -hs *
84M 3fcdd194880fbf2be796613aee89c221
74M d00edb3d4a285124a2ee822f57b33698

For two relatively simple packages it is quite a high price to pay to use 150MB for the convenience of having dependency management taken out of my hands. What I will do is elaborate on whether it's possible to circumvent this easily, though for the moment I took the bootstrapped environment for the sake of simplicity. I can see the logic for usability, but am interested in the ease of development/contributing, as I am keen to switch this mechanism off so I can easily install these plugins locally and contribute back.

Conclusion

I still really like Lektor, as with any new project it's great to see the innovations made and get the bit between my teeth to delve into something new. This was always about having some really quick blogging software as well, and I can totally see this fulfils that goal as I haven't scratched the surface of Lektor and it's plugin ecosystem yet. That said, I'm skipping past doing this a little to get things published and done!!!

At least there's a record of what I need to do now. ;-)

PS. Also noticed some weirdness in trying to link between blogposts using relative URLs in the markdown body. Best investigate that too in case I'm being dense!