Publ v0.5.11, Authl v0.3.5

Some fresh new versions of things.

Publ

Changes to Publ:

• Massive improvements to how footnotes are handled; now they get their own virtual section (so if you’re currently using footnotes you’ll need to update your templates!)¹
• Various performance improvements:
  • Some internal caching on image rendition stuff
  • Reduce contention in the content indexer (to hopefully make large sites more responsive on restart)
  • Minor optimizations to category.subcats
• Removed config.secret_key; now this should be configured on the application object per Flask standards
• Allow HTML attributes other than href and src to contain image renditions

Authl

• Improve WebFinger support
• Improve the JavaScript in the default Flask template

Pushl v0.2.14, Authl v0.3.4

Double-whammy release today.

Authl v0.3.3

Just a tiny fix in this; it works around an inconsistency between the IndieAuth spec and IndieAuth.com’s implementation. Normally I’d just be all, “this is a bug in IndieAuth.com” but that’s the most popular IndieAuth endpoint right now so I decided it was prudent to make a compromise. And really it’s a good idea to always specify an Accept: header anyway.

Thanks to Colin for bringing this to my attention.

Authl v0.3.2

I’ve now released v0.3.2 of Authl, which adds the following changes:

• Fixed IndieAuth URL validation rules
• Improved UX for login type preview
• Now it supports Twitter on “stateless” hosting

As an experiment I’ve enabled Twitter login on this site, so now you should be able to use it to look at protected entries.

Publ 0.5.8, Authl 0.3.1, and IndieAuth security

So, both Publ and Authl had a pretty naïve issue with the identity verification step of the IndieAuth flow; it simply accepted whatever the authorization endpoint said the user’s identity was. This made it very simple to spoof one’s identity and log in as anyone on any Publ or Authl site.

Authl 0.3.1 fixes the problem with the IndieAuth login flow, and Publ 0.5.8 fixes the problem with the Bearer token flow.

Authl v0.3.0

I just released Authl v0.3.0; minor version bump because of a public API change, to better facilitate stateless storage.

Which is to say I converted most of the handlers to be stateless, which hopefully fixes the issues with running on Heroku.

Unfortunately Twitter couldn’t be fixed easily but I wasn’t running the Twitter handler on this site anyway. I do have some ideas but they’re fairly involved and will have to come later, and not when I’m up way past my bedtime.

Also, there still seems to be some cache-related issue that’s making it necessary to shift-reload the page after logging in or out, sometimes.

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!

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)

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.

Publ 0.4.6, Authl 0.1.5

Updated some packages.

Main things with Publ since the last release:

• Internal cleanups to how caching happens
• Stop spuriously-caching a bunch of stuff; in particular login/logout endpoint URLs no longer get cached
• Various cleanups
• Improve the way that built-in templates are managed
• Initial cruddy implementation of an admin authentication dashboard (although this isn’t quite ready for prime time)

The only Authl change is that email identities are now given as a full mailto: URL; going forward all identity strings will be full URLs. This simplifies the UX for admin dashboards, in particular, and removes some ambiguity.

Publ 0.4.5.1, Authl 0.1.4

I’ve released a mini-update of Publ to fix an authentication problem (the config parser was “helpfully” sanitizing things that didn’t want to be sanitized), and also some refactoring/improvements/bugfixes to Authl.

The big changes to Authl are that the email handler generates shorter/nicer links, and it also puts an anti-abuse timeout into email login attempts to prevent people from spamming themselves or others with spurious email notifications. There’s also a bunch of small bugfixes to Authl’s login flow, and Flask apps can specify that sessions should not be made permanent.

v0.4.4, and private entries in the wild

I’ve added private entry stuff to my website (here’s an example post) and in doing so I shook out a few loose ends:

• Improved the login flow for when someone is logged in but goes to an entry they don’t have access to
• Simplified generating login and logout links from templates
• Added Status: UNLISTED as a synonym for Status: HIDDEN

All the auth-related things are now documented here and also demonstrated in the sample templates.

There is not much left for v0.5, incidentally!

v0.4.3! Authentication!

Wow, this is a pretty major update: authentication is now a thing!

It isn’t quite complete yet – I still have a few more things I want to add before I consider it done (and therefore release v0.5.0) – but this is at least in a state where it’s ready to be experimented with. Probably. I need to sleep first, before I start adding authentication to my website.

Auth is working nicely

I’ve released Authl 0.1.1, which adds support for Mastodon authentication. And the Publ test suite now is up-to-date with that as well.

There’s a few things I want to do on Publ before I release a version for use on my own website, the big one being the ability to provide a better login page, and some refactoring around built-in templates now that built-in templates are becoming a thing.

I also really want to redo how I manage the documentation site, because it’s getting kind of untenable at this point.

Anyway, really soon I’ll have properly-private content on my website again, and hopefully this will be enough of a feature for people to actually be interested in Publ!

Authl updates

I’ve put a bunch more work into Authl, and have released it into PyPI. Of note is that now it has a simplified mechanism for setting it up with a Flask application.

Hey, wait, Publ’s a Flask application!

How about that.

Authl finally under progress

I wrote more about this on my personal blog but to summarize, I finally made some progress on actually working on Authl, which was the missing piece I needed before finally getting started on private posts. No promises on when I’ll actually have that functionality working, but at least I’ve finally gotten over the chicken-and-egg bump of not having any auth system to implement privacy against (and no privacy system to implement auth for).

Anyway, if anyone wants to play with what I have so far, there’s an incredibly basic starting point over yonder.

An early-alpha Movable Type importer

For those folks who want to import their content from Movable Type over to Publ, I’ve finally gotten around to writing an importer. Currently it only attempts to convert entry content and category metadata, and only using SQLite-formatted database dumps.

See its README.md for the (incredibly rough) usage instructions.

Eventually I want to try to automatically convert templates from MT’s scripting language to Jinja-Publ templates, although there’s a bunch of stuff that’s going to be difficult to port across and a lot of stuff is just plain not feasible to even try, so don’t expect that to become a major thing any time soon.

Pushl v0.1.3, and a FeedOnFeeds update!

I just released Pushl v0.1.3, which adds some minor performance optimizations and a bug fix.

Originally I was hoping to have a major performance optimization, in the form of having rewritten Pushl from thread-per-connection to async operation, but unfortunately I ran into a bunch of problems with it. Mostly that I was running into a “too many open files” error and I couldn’t figure out what was causing a descriptor leak. I have the work-in-progress branch online if anyone wants to take a look at it.

Anyway, the reason I went down this route is because I added WebSub subscriber support to my fork of Feed-On-Feeds, which makes it so that WebSub-enabled RSS and Atom feeds will push their updates to your reader instead of having to wait for a polling interval.

You can read more about some of my other thoughts on a blog entry that quickly devolves into a rant, if you’re so inclined.