Why Publ won’t support magic auth links

Since adding user authentication to Publ, I’ve been thinking of ways of allowing people to subscribe to sites from feed readers while getting their own native authorization, so that people can see entries directly in their readers rather than needing the clumsy mechanisms of unauthorized placeholder entries.

Out of the box, Publ authentication does support a shared cookie jar; if you can provide your cookies to your feed reader in some way, then things will Just Work. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any feed readers that actually support this, at least not easily. (Back when most browsers had a feed reader built-in this was a lot simpler. But time marches on.)

The two mechanisms which seemed most promising are AutoAuth and “magic links,” where users get signed URLs that come pre-authenticated and show the full authorized content for that user. AutoAuth is still in a draft phase that’s stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation (and also requires a lot of buy-in to IndieWeb protocols, which is still a pill too large to swallow for most of the folks who follow my blog), so magic feed links seemed like the best path forward.

I even got so far as to draft out an implementation, but there’s a few bad issues with it which just made me opt not to.

v0.3.19, now with extra tagging goodness!

I’ve released Publ v0.3.19, which now finally has a tagging system, which is only one of the oldest issues that was still open.

Here’s a list of what’s been added or changed since 0.3.18:

• The test site is now part of the Publ repository itself (as mentioned previously)
• Added crop and fullsize_crop to image renditions (although I’ve already decided the format should be different after using this for a day)
• Made Path-Alias less annoying
• Fixed an issue with unpaged archive links getting filtered
• Prune missing files from the index

Credits

I want to thank Karina Antonio for implementing image cropping.

v0.3.18, now with better asset management!

I’ve just released v0.3.18, with the following changes:

• Add date grouping properties to entry
• Add a pages property to view
• Provide the current category object to the error handler
• Support linking to non-image/non-entry local files
• Added, then removed, some performance micro-optimizations that only caused problems

More details about the major changes below!

Update: I released a hotfix as 0.3.18.1 because there was a last-minute bug that snuck in while I was trying to silence a new pylint error. Oops.

v0.3.15 Released (finally!)

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to work on Publ, but the great thing is that I actually had a reason to work on it for my day job. Which is to say I’m finally being paid to work on Publ. ;)

Changes since 0.3.14:

• Add requirement for Arrow 0.13.0 (issue 41)
• Fix a dumb tpyo that was the cause of issue 158
• Don’t rewrite DRAFT files; fixes 137
• Move sample-site files back to the library repo rather than in the doc repo
• Fix the way we map malformed category URLs (issue 156)
• Update upstream library versions
• Move version number to publ module
• Allow empty slug-text in entry route (fixes 161)
• Process HTML entries, to finally handle issues 136 and 154.

Some more information about that last one under the cut!