Publ v0.5.3, Authl v0.2.2

I’ve released updates to both Publ and Authl.

On the Authl side:

• Code quality and documentation improvements
• Add an asynchronous client-side lookup thing that tells users how their login will proceed
• Add the redirection target to disposition.Error so that can be preserved correctly
• Update the Flask wrapper to use disposition.Error.redir
• Let the application know the redirection target in render_login_func

On the Publ side:

• If the site is configured to force HTTPS in authentication, force the cookie to be HTTPS-only
• If a user is already logged in, make the login handler redirect them to their destination

For both:

• Improved build scripts to make it less convenient to accidentally push a build from the wrong branch or version

These changes help to keep sites more secure from eavesdroppers, while also hopefully improving the user experience!

Pushl v0.2.8

I’ve released v0.2.8 of Pushl, which fixes an issue with Webmention and Pingback where it was over-optimistically setting the link target. It will also warn you if the link target doesn’t match with the actual page, so you can update your links accordingly.

Right now it’s a little spammy (in that it’ll tell you about redirection mismatches for all links, not just ones with a Webmention or Pingback endpoint), but the next version will address that.

Authl v0.2.0, now in beta status!

I’ve released Authl v0.2.0. Changes since v0.1.8:

• Added support for Twitter
• Big ol' refactor to support Twitter (see the fuller discussion below the cut!)
• Released to beta!

And changes from v0.1.7 to v0.1.8 (which I didn’t bother to post an announcement about):

• Fixed an incredibly minor security issue in the Mastodon client (the client_secret was leaking but in the context of Mastodon that couldn’t really be used for anything anyway)
• Centralize/refactor the login token management, allowing for future flexibility in the service stack
• Make callback IDs protocol-stable, which helps with some stricter services (e.g. Twitter)

Pushl v0.2.7

Around a month ago a bunch of my webmention stuff broke on my site, and I just figured out what was causing it. Pushl was getting confused by the fact that I had multiple feeds which provided the same content, and some of them were in a no-webmentions context. The no-webmentions ones were getting processed first, which was preventing the webmention-context versions from actually being processed.

So, I fixed this bug by making the context part of what dedupes the actions.

Every time I work on Pushl I feel like it could use a major rewrite, incidentally. This is one of those times.

Authl v0.1.7, now with IndieAuth support!

I’ve released Authl v0.1.7, which now adds direct support for IndieAuth (rather than requiring IndieLogin.com as a broker). This means that now folks who have an IndieAuth identity can log in using that; previously I was expecting IndieLogin.com to eventually open up client registrations to make that a useful authentication path, but for various reasons Aaron hasn’t opened it up to the general public.

Part of this update was to also refactor how OAuth is handled, so it’ll be a lot easier for me to add more OAuth-based providers in the future; hopefully I’ll have direct support for Twitter, GitHub, and maybe even Facebook in the near-ish future. But for now, between Mastodon, email, and IndieAuth, I think I have all of my own personal needs taken care of.

Feel free to make suggestions for other identity providers in the Authl issue tracker, though!

v0.5.1 released (also Authl v0.1.6)

Oh gosh I seem to be on a roll with these updates again. Here’s what changed in Publ:

• Fixed a silly bug in the admin dashboard renderer which made it not work in production mode
• Make the admin log only record the most recent access per user per entry, making it way more useful
• Make the logout operation happen via POST method rather than GET, fixing a problem with browser prefetching; added a logout.html template to support that. (Also made the default unauthorized.html use Authl’s default CSS.)
• Actually make entry.authorized available, rather than just documented. Also gave it a better name while I was at it.
• view.entries can now take an optional argument for inlining unauthorized entries, improving its usage within feeds.
• view.unauthorized can now take an optional argument for limiting the unauthorized view count, which helps performance and makes it a bit more predictable
• Images now provide their filename as the default alt text, which is arguably better for accessibility than just leaving it a blank string. I am willing to change my mind on this, however.
• Cleaned up the code around category.subcats(recurse=True) and also added some actual tests for the sort ordering. They pass.

And the Authl changes (which were actually released before Publ 0.5.0 but I didn’t bother announcing them until I had them tested “in the wild”):

• Changed to using packaged data for templates
• Made the login page CSS available through url_for
• Removed the spurious precision from the email message template

Anyway, I of course updated the sample beesbuzz.biz templates to reflect the new functionality.

Wow, Publ’s feeling like it’s actually kinda pretty good at stuff now. I hope someone else ever wants to actually, like, use it or something.

v0.5.0 released

I figured there wasn’t really any reason to keep waiting. So here we are.

Changes since v0.4.6:

• Improve the performance and stability of the admin dashboard
• Correctly fall back to the internal Authl templates
• Remove some spurious/empty attributes from image tags
• Don’t cache template mappings forever
• Don’t mark an entry title as being markup if its markup is disabled
• Correctly set the default entry recursion for entry.previous/next
• Disable an arrow warning for a future change

In other news, over on my main website I have successfully migrated my comments over to Isso, which is a nice self-hosted alternative to Disqus that does a much better job of handling privacy in particular, as well as providing a simpler UX that doesn’t try to get in your face about everything. If you want to read more about how I made that change, read the several blog entries starting with “Moving away from Disqus,” and also look at the sample templates to see the actual implementation.

May your private entries remain exclusive, and your public entries be brilliant.

UPDATE: Someday I’ll learn to use and test rc builds before making an actual public release. Oops.