Updates and stuff

May 30, 2026 // pelican , writing

Well, that was fun.

Today I woke up and chose chaos. Okay, not right when I woke up. The small humans who also live here both had some birthday money left over and bought themselves Yoshi and the Myserious Book. I spent maybe an hour playing it this morning after we ate breakfast. It's cute! More thoughts on that later, maybe.

Then, for some reason, I decided to dust off this old blog.

I am not a developer myself, though in my day job I am developer-adjacent. I know just enough to be dangerous, PEBKAC, etc etc. You may notice I only made one post here, about sixteen months ago. Lots has happened since then, as it does with us all, and I have absolutely no memory of that process. I was recently discussing static site generators with my friends Ben and Nic and couldn't remember which SSG I'd used for this. I said "Oh, Pelican sounds like something I'd have used" and confidently stopped thinking about it. Flash forward to today, and I spent the better part of an hour wondering why the fresh flaming hell I couldn't get Pelican working. I finally thought to look at basic file structures, and it turns out I'd written the original using Jekyll.

I thought to myself, "Self, it's not like there's a ton of muscle memory if you can't remember the damn thing was an entirely different system in the first place." I proceeded, wisely or not, to reinvent a wheel in Pelican instead. Sure, it uses Python. But the real reason, if we're being honest, is the name itself. My grandfather was fond of of this little poem and would recite it from time to time:

A wonderful bird is the pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican,
He can take in his beak
Enough food for a week
But I'm damned if I see how the helican! ¹

— Dixon Lanier Merritt, "A Wonderful Bird Is The Pelican."

So in a mentally exhausting series of events, I've spent the last few hours learning how Pelican works, how the theme templates work, a little bit of how nano works... how GitHub Actions work, briefly how the Pokemon Trainer Quiz toy reset works... the works.