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Adding Remark42 for comments functionality

2026-05-30T00:00:00+02:00

I was thinking about adding a comments functionality to the site for some time already, but I wasn't really sure if it was even possible on a static website, and how to combine it with Pelican. Well, it turns out, it's actually not that difficult at all!

I found Remark42. A privacy-focused lightweight commenting engine. The recommended way is to spin up a docker container for the backend server. This works perfectly for my setup. On the "frontend" (in my case Jinja2 templates, which Pelican uses to generate its layout), you paste a small JS snippet to your base template and another HTML snippet to your articles' snippet where Remark42 will insert itself when the page loads.

Now, to the part which wasn't so obvious - theming the thing. By default, Remark42 has only two themes, light, and dark and to my knowledge no "easy/direct" way to define custom colors. The default colors are nice and I believe work great for simple dark/light websites, but if you have a custom theme or use different colors on your website, it just doesn't fit in...

So how did I fix this? I have to admit, I vibe-coded this a bit, or at least let Gemini figure the colors for me. In the project's source tree there is the directory /frontend/apps/remark42/app/styles/ with two files: custom-properties.css and global.css. In the custom-properties.css there are custom variables which (as I understand) influence colors of the various elements of the UI. The thing is, there aren't any comments which would say "--color8 is the background color of the form, and --color35 is for this etc." (Note: there are vars like --primary-color, --error-background, which are self-explanatory). Or maybe there are comments somewhere, I just haven't found them. Tell me if there are.

What I did was, I took the custom-properties.css file, gave the contents to Gemini and also gave it my site's css color variables and told it to modify the file so it fits with my colors.

After that I cloned the repo, modified the custom-properties.css file and built the "custom themed" docker image. And honestly, I think it did a pretty good job. So if anyone is trying to theme Remark, try this "vibe-coded remark colors" approach.

Anyhow... Why did I add comments in the first place? Well, I thought that if someone found something useful on this website, but had questions, or maybe wanted to say "Hi!" or "Thanks!" or "You <insert bad word>", then it would be nice to have that option.

For any questions, you can ask them in the comments now. Yay! 😎

(PS: I haven't set up notifications for the comments, so I apologize in advance if I don't answer)

Site update! Now using Pelican SSG

2026-04-02T00:00:00+02:00

Initially I created the site with python's Flask framework, a package called Frozen Flask and the python-markdown package. Python-markdown created the article html files, Flask created the routes and served the template pages, and Frozen Flask turned those server side generated pages into a set of static html files. I basically created a small static site generator of my own. This was a fun little thing, but for a more complex "blog" or "personal site" I decided I should switch to a more "battle tested" pre-made tool for this.

I still wanted control over the website, like what the templates would look like, the styling and some functionality. And so, I found Pelican, which is one of multiple popular python static site generators. It supports Markdown and ReStructuredText, Jija2 templates for the website layout/themes, generating RSS/Atom feeds and many more functionalities I haven't yet explored, like writing your own plugins.

The documentation is pretty nice, and even I was able to make sense of it. It took me a few hours tinkering and I was able to port my existing site layout/Jinja2 templates to it. My theme definitely doesn't support all the options which a dedicated Pelican theme would need, but for my purposes and settings it works.

So now, with this new site engine, the website has RSS/Atom feeds. I can add tags to each article, set the author(s) (if someone else wrote the article), generate new category on the fly (although in my theme, the categories have images and I have to add those manually), mark article as a draft, hide an article, set a language for the article and have it display other languages in which the article is written in, and many more options I am sure I am not even aware of right now.

Finally, I'd like to say big thanks to all the contributors of Pelican for creating this awesome tool.

First post! Let's see how this goes

2026-02-10T00:00:00+01:00

Hello people of the Internet! I don't really know what the first post on a personal website should be about but here we go. I have finally managed to put together some html and css to create this "first draft" of the website. As I write in the about page I created the site because I find it really cool of people having their own little personal islands, where their own creativity can shine and the decentralization/independence of it.

I also wanted to learn more about html, css, javascript (although this site doesn't contain any, yet) and the web as a whole. Another thing I wanted to learn about was the python Flask framework (at least the basics), ~~with which this website is created and then converted into a static set of html files~~ (Now uses Pelican SSG). I might write about this in more detail in a future post.

I think that's all for now. Don't want to make an essay out of this.

See ya later.