Parallel-42 Technologies

Shop? What Shop?

What's this? A post that's not part of the site-meta category? Is that something you can do here?

Well, it is my site, so I suppose I can do what I want with it, right?

What Is It?

Several years ago, for completely unrelated reasons, I purchased a vinyl cutter. When I started toying around with it, I also started making stickers and vinyl logos of stuff I was interested in. For fun, I threw a couple of them up on an Etsy shop. Much to my surprise, they started selling. Selling enough to now have long since paid for the cutter and purchased a new one (higher precision, faster, and quieter).

So I've been selling one particular sticker off and on for the last couple of years. It's a vinyl cutout of the Belter Navy/OPA from the book and TV series The Expanse. Some of my all-time favorite media across genres and formats, I wasn't finding a lot in the way of logos and stickers. So since then, I've sold quite a few of them, usually between 3-5 per month. Nothing spectacular, but enough to keep me busy and a small trickle of cash.

What Happened Last Week

I don't know what triggered it, but something kicked off a HUGE volume of Expanse/OPA searches on Etsy, and my shop is always one of the first results. In less than 24h, I had more than 12 orders for that vinyl, and they're still coming in.

The only thing I can see is that there was a very popular reddit thread with a logo that's similar to the one I sell, and that must have kicked off a big surge in searches.

Whatever the reason, I'm not going to complain. I enjoy making them and prepping them for shipping.

Where Do I Go to Look?

If you want to have a look, my shop can be found here. You'll find the OPA/Belter logo and a few other things that I've had fun making.

Maybe Not Custom

Well, maybe we won't be doing a fully custom theme right now. I realized how little I know about Bootstrap, and even less about how to use it with a templating system like Jinja (which is what Pelican uses). I'm not giving up, though. It's definitely something on my list.

What Is This, Then?

This is a pre-built theme for Pelican called Blue Penguin Dark. I like it because it actually already fits with the color scheme I'm looking to implement in the future. So I can use it as a jumping off point. Maybe I'll even use this theme as a base and customize it as I need to.

Next Steps

I can already see one thing I'm going to customize on this theme, and that's the date format for posting. It currently lists the posts by time, which I don't (currently) flag when I create them. So I'm going to make it reflect the date instead. If I decide to include timestamps, then I'll update to that. But for now, as frequently (or infrequently) as I post, date is more than enough granularity for me.

It's Not Much, Yet...

The first of the theming steps has been accomplished. It doesn't look like much, and to be quite honest, it's not. Yet.

What Did We Do?

First off, I added the templates for theming. They are super basic out of the box, and literally just put the content in place within a bare HTML framework.

Yeah, not very exciting to start things out. But it's the beginning.

After that, I added the stylesheet for Bootstrap, which is a framework upon which I'll build the rest of the site styling. As it sits, again, there's not much to it. Yet.

What's Next?

Next, I get to brush up on using Bootstrap to make the site look like what I want. That will include layout, colors, navigation, etc. A part of that will be enabling the scripting that makes Bootstrap extremely powerful.

But one step at a time.

Theming Time...

As with any personal site, making it look the way you want is a key milestone. So that's what I'm starting today.

What's The Plan?

I think at first, I'm going to focus on colors, taking the default layout and just customizing that part. Once I get a feel for how it works, I'll start tinkering with things like fonts and layouts.

Ultimately, I plan to customize as much of this site as I can get my hands on without breaking something. This will also help me learn the ins and outs of Pelican and how to make it do what I want.

Anything Else?

I have some ideas on my goals of automation, but that's going to take me some time to sort out. As of right now, it's barely the stub of an idea, so I won't be putting anything about it here for a while yet.

First Steps...

One of the main things I wanted to do with this site was simplify management and ultimately automate things.

Why?

I tend to come up with ideas that I think might be interesting at odd times and in weird (or, rather, not convenient for taking notes down) places.

So one of my goals with this site is ultimately to be able to use Google Assistant/Gemini to create a post for me and queue it for editing any time I think of something.

But For Today...

That goal is probably a long way off, and one of the core tenets of Engineering Stuff™ is making small changes and testing, rather than changing a bunch of stuff and then having to figure out what change didn't work.

So the first change here is to git-ify the site. I directed Pelican to generate the initial site, created the welcome post, and published all of that to the site in the last installment.

I then created a new private git repo (conveniently named parallel-42.com), synced the current folder to it, and pushed.

So now, whenever I create a post or make edits to things (which I'll be doing a lot of), it keeps everything in sync wherever I am.

Where Are You Now?

For now, I'm working on my laptop in the living room, typing this into Visual Studio Code (which has a great markdown preview feature), which is hooked into a Fedora 41 install running in WSL2.

That's the 10,000ft view, and I'll probably dig into that later, because I actually find it interesting.

So that's it for this post. I'm going to make some changes, test, and then sync them now.

Welcome!

This is a new adventure I'm embarking on, and this post will be a quick preview of what it's all about.

The Mission

I've been doing web stuff for a long time, never with really any consistency. Usually, it's just a project here or there when I come across something that interests me.

I'm rebuilding this site in order to learn more about static site generation (I'll get into the details of that as we go), and this is my first foray into it using Pelican.

Why Pelican?

I've used static generators before for projects. Primarily, I used Jekyll in the past, which works well, but it's written in Ruby. Not that there's anything specifically bad about Ruby, it's just not a language I ever got into.

Pelican, on the other hand, is written in Python. I'm much more familiar with it, I don't have to install anything special, etc. Just a better flow for me.

What's Next?

Good question. I think a lot of posts here are going to end up with the "site-meta" tag for a while as I learn more about how things work and how I want to organize them.

So sit tight, and welcome back to my home.