Getting rid of the # format in Flex

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +1300

Back when I was getting this blog set up, I had a short whinge about the default way that the Flex theme created links to pages.

Specficially, creating a link to “Tuna Patties” (for example), Flex would append the link with an identical stub, such as https://www.ericlight.com/tuna-patties.html#tuna-patties

I thought this was silly, so I found a way to fix it, but never bothered submitting a Pull Request to Alexandre because I figured it was intentional.

Well, it turns out I wasn’t the only one. The good Dmytro Litvinov thought the same, and he created a Pull Request to fix it, almost a whole year ago!

Now, you can avoid this behaviour by simply adding DISABLE_URL_HASH = True to your pelicanconf.py!

Tidying up Pelican's URLs with the Flex theme

Sun, 23 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +1300

This is just a brain-dump of tweaks I’ve made to my Pelican environment to get tidy URLs. In summary: One theme tweak, one Nginx tweak.

Making the Flex Theme drop the ugly url#slug format:

I’ve decided I’m going to roll with the Flex theme for a while. I like it, but it had this habit of putting anchors and slugs into my article URLs.

For example, my first page is known to Pelican as “welcome-to-the-internet”. However, links to the page were automatically created as “welcome-to-the-internet#welcome-to-the-internet”. It seems redundant. Also, it says the same thing twice. It repeats itself.

I discovered the issue in the Flex theme. It’s under /templates/index.html, circa lines 7 and 29. Simply change:

{{ article.url }}#{{ article.slug }}

… to…

{{ article.slug }}

Fixed!

I haven’t submitted a pull request to Alexandre, because I suspect it’s intentional.

Getting Nginx to serve tidy urls:

By default, Pelican creates great urls like {server}/Ramblings/welcome-to-the-internet

This is great, but it CREATES files like /var/www/Ramblings/welcome-to-the-internet.html

Nginx by default doesn’t see “welcome-to-the-internet” and automatically serve “welcome-to-the-internet.html”. The lack of a file extention means that the .html file is fundamentally a different file, so it returns a handy-dandy 404 error instead.

To fix this, open /etc/nginx/sites-available/yoursite, and find:

location / {
 try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}

Change it to the following - note I’ve added $uri.htm and $uri.html, to inform Nginx that it should try appending .htm or .html onto the end of a uri if it can’t find the page:

location / {
 try_files $uri.htm $uri.html $uri =404;
}

All done, happy tidy URLs!

Pelican on Such geek. Wow.

Getting rid of the # format in Flex

Tidying up Pelican's URLs with the Flex theme

Making the Flex Theme drop the ugly url#slug format:

Getting Nginx to serve tidy urls: