The problem#

In an RSS/Atom feed, relative links are a bad idea because it's unclear what they're relative to. There are ways to specify a base for them to be relative to, but since feed readers do not consistently respect those mechanisms, it's safer to just always use absolute URLs in feeds. And Pelican recommends setting RELATIVE_URLS = False to always generate absolute URLs. But that setting does not apply to the anchor links generated by the Markdown toc extension to link to headers.

The solution#

I wrote a Pelican plugin, absolute_anchors which rewrites all link destinations starting with # in every article to add the absolute URL of the article at the beginning of the link.

The details#

The problem#

My previous blog post has a footnote in the first sentence. Due to the way footnotes are handled, the footnote reference is a link to #fn:prg, which works fine if the footnote is actually on the page, but on the blog main page (or any other listing of multiple articles) the footnote is not present because it's after the Read more… link. The result is that on those pages, all footnote references are broken links. These broken links should either be repaired such that they point to the article page or removed.

First attempt#

Unable to find an existing solution, I decided to write my own plugin, summary_footnotes. I started by finding another plugin, clean_summary that modifies summary and based my code off of it. That plugin uses Beautiful Soup to parse the summary and rewrite it. A quick look at the docs and I was able to figure out how to select the footnote links and rewrite them, which got me this version of the plugin.