pelicanthemes.com website throwing 500s

[tidux]

It looks like an Apache standard INTERNAL SERVER ERROR message.

[avaris]

It is working for me know. Also for the record, as far as I know, that site is a user project and is not handled by pelican maintainers. So, not much we can do either way :).

[Aluriak]

Same observation ; who are the authors ? Maybe can we tell them about that problem ?

[avaris]

Checked again. still working. I think the owner is here: https://github.com/m-allanson/pelican-themes

[Aluriak]

Mmmh. It is working now.

Looks like the problem was fixed, or that the server is down sometimes.

Thank you for the link, i will tell the author if i encounter the problem again.

[Lucas-C]

Seems like the website is down...
Maybe du to end of Heroku free tier?

[georgevreilly]

@justinmayer, http://pelicanthemes.com/ is down.

Application error

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command
heroku logs --tail

[justinmayer]

Yes, I’m aware, but it’s not a site that I control. If someone would like to help get it back up, please reach out to the person Deniz identified above and ask about what we can do to help get the site restored. Thanks!

[maphew]

In trying to work around this I had what seems to be the bright idea of "hey let's create a static site to preview a static site generator's themes" in Github Codespaces.

Here's my recipe (updated 2022-12-17).

pip install pelican[markdown]
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-blog`.git
git clone --depth=1 --recurse-submodules https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes.git

Create make-theme-outputs.sh and fill with:

#!/bin/bash
# silence warnings about missing images folder, which isn't in code repo 
mkdir -p "pelican-blog/content/images"
for i in pelican-themes/* ; do
  if [ -d "$i" ]; then
    theme=$(basename "$i")
    echo "### $theme ###"
    pelican \
      pelican-blog/content \
      --settings pelican-blog/pelicanconf.py \
      --relative-urls \
      --theme-path pelican-themes/$theme \
      --output output/$theme \
      --ignore-cache \
      --delete-output-directory
  fi
done

Then make the script executable: chmod +x make-theme-outputs.sh and (attempt to) generate all theme previews:

./make-theme-outputs.sh

A bunch of the themes do not create html files, only create feeds xml. I'm not sure why that is, perhaps related to #677.

If this or something like it could be tied to github actions and a preview snapshot generated for each of them on merging their PR there would be no reliance on 3rd party hosts.

edited 2022-12-27: fixed broken output generation (use relative urls), cleaner git checkout of submodules; moved screenshot to related new issue

[maphew]

See #740 for a publicly viewable and working implementation of #731 (comment)

[Rhomboid]

Please remove the reference to this url in your README, or point it to something that works. If the site has been dead for 6 months and you don't control the domain, you're just wasting everyone's time.

[justinmayer]

The original registrant of pelicanthemes.com and creator of the site that appeared on that domain was kind enough to reach out and ask if I wanted to take over the domain. So I paid for a year in order to start the transfer process, and as of 48 hours ago, I now have the ability to point pelicanthemes.com to wherever we decide it should resolve.

I should also mention that the person who created that site also offered to transfer to this organization the repository that contained the Flask-powered application that generated the site. I haven't had time to put much thought into whether that is the right approach, whether the solution that @maphew built might be better, or whether there are other approaches we should consider.

So for now I thought I would at least mention that we have a path to resolving this issue, as soon as we decide how exactly we want to do that.

[maphew]

that's cool! kudos to the domain owner for passing that on, and you Justin for picking up the bill. <3

I've no opinion on the Flask route as I've no experience with it. On general principle a static preview site for a static site generator is apropos. My solition is pretty basic though.

[johann-petrak]

Is there any progress on making the site work again? I think having a site that does not work for a really long time might actually be worse than having no site at all.
For people who just want to use a tool like pelican, but NOT design their own themes, some easy way to pick a theme that fits their needs is absolutely essential, so I think having all the articles who talk about pelican link to http://www.pelicanthemes.com/ and then have that site be broken for a long time really hurts the pelican project.

[justinmayer]

@johann-petrak: As you can imagine, this is a known issue, the importance of which is already acknowledged. At the same time, project maintainers do their best with the limited time available for open-source development.

The most effective way to help move this forward is to support Pelican development by becoming a sponsor 🌟

[jaideep2]

@justinmayer @avaris For your convenience pelicanthemes.xyz forwards to https://avaris.github.io/pelican-themes as a backup

[justinmayer]

@jaideep2: I appreciate the intention, but since we've already acquired the pelicanthemes.com domain (as noted above), I'm not sure the domain name proliferation will be particularly helpful. There is already a comment to PR (748) in which I discuss how we might serve the generated assets directly from the pelicanthemes.com domain.

[jaideep2]

@justinmayer Sure, go ahead. This can just serve as a backup 😄

[justinmayer]

https://pelicanthemes.com is now back up. Many thanks to @maphew and @avaris for their work on this! 🎊