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OK, I admit it. I goofed. Linux Mint 19, Tara came out at the end of June and I was very excited about doing the update. I used the instructions from the ‘How to upgrade to Linux Mint 19’ tutorial to perform the steps. As instructed, I used the Timeshift tool to make a backup and proceeded. Unfortunately, the upgrade did not go well and I ended up with a non-bootable Mint installation. At this point, I should have followed the advise in section C2 of the upgrade tutorial and run Timeshift from the bootable USB drive that I was using to recover my back up files. But, I didn’t. ...

I am moving my site from WordPress to Pelican. It is not that there is anything wrong with WordPress. It is a major tool in the web world. But, it is really overkill for my little blog. Pelican, on the other hand, is a static site generator tool written in the python language. So why Pelican? Pelican produces plain HTML pages with CSS. This means there is no database and no administration tool online. Since it is just HTML, there are no worries about WordPress upgrades or security patches. This also cuts out several attack vectors for hackers since it eliminates the backend database and various plugins. ...

No, this is not about John Grisham’s third novel or a 1993 movie starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. Instead, I’m referring to a static website generator application named “Pelican”. Overview So, what is a static site generator? The concept is kind of a throw-back to the earlier days of the internet when web sites were largely just a collection of HTML files. A static site generator can take text files stored locally on your computer, convert them to HTML and generate a multi-page web site from them. The resulting HTML output can then be uploaded to your web server. Pelican is one of the many available site generators out there. ...