Jeff MacKinnon's Homepage

Articles in the thefog category

Auto Posting to Mastodon

Something that I find a little annoying is having to manually post things to different social media. I like to post JUST to my site here and then syndicate to socials, mostly just mastodon, but I would like to figure it out for other corporate socials too.

There is a …

Newsboat for quiet reading

I have started working on a little personal project I like to call, computing like its 1999. Part of this is moving a lot of the things that I do from a browser to a local app, and when possible to a TUI/CLI interface to further reduce distraction and …

LaTeX for notes

I finally ran out of daily planned pages in my notebook from the last print that I did. I made the template using AutoCAD because it was the tool that I had on my computer that I knew how to use at the time.

This time however, I decided to …

Parsing OPML with Python

I had a request to create a human-readable list of the OPML files that I posted earlier this week.

RSS Still Wins in 2025

Its January 2025 and the internet as we knew it in 2020 is again being upended. Elmo and Muskrat are both kneeling down and working to ensure that we, as society, are not able to communicate and connect.

Luckily for us, this is a problem that was solved at the …

Jeff's Pelican SSG Theme

I have been using the theme that I started working on in March 2021, and even branched a copy for JMK Engineering.

Since then I have added a bunch of features, customizations, etc to it so that I can customize most of it from the pelican configuration files.

I have …

The Picture Workflow

To manage all of the pictures that we take in this home, and with all the different cameras that we have around the house, there are a lot of pictures. So how do we make sure that the pictures we take are available for viewing?

Like This

First we have …

Building a webarchive with Archivebox

Link rot (archived-link) is a very real thing, and something that I'm noticing even more now. In 2020 I was optimistic with so many friends and people that I followed on different social media platforms starting blogs, but only a couple years later they are offline, the sites, the people …

Self-Hosting this site at home

While I was trying to figure out the commenting for this site I was using the FTP a lot. I have a daily batchfile that runs to update this site and created a local mirror, but the CLI FTP portion kept breaking.

Because of those two things I decided to …

Batch Files are your friend

Something that my pelican experience was missing was a little automation that my Unix friends enjoy with makerfiles. I'm sure that there is a windows workaround, or I could just continue to work in WSL for my pelican life.

I do enjoy working in WSL and all the Linux life …