Publ v0.5.14 released!

Today I released v0.5.14 of Publ, which has a bunch of improvements:

• Fixed a bug in card retrieval when there’s no summary
• Admin panel works again
• Markdown entry headings now get individual permalinks (the presentation of which can be templated)
• Markdown entry headings can be extracted into an outline to be used for a table of contents
• Lots of performance improvements around ToC and footnote extraction, and template API functions in general

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)

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!

Pushl v0.2.0 released

So, I just released v0.2.0 of Pushl. It was a pretty big change, in that I pretty much rewrote all the networking stuff, and fixed some pretty ridiculous bugs with the caching implementation as well.

The main thing is now it’s using async I/O instead of thread-per-connection, so it’s way more efficient and also times out correctly.

And oh gosh, I had so many tiny but critical errors in the way caching was implemented – no wonder it kept on acting as if there was no cached state. Yeesh.

Anyway, I’ll let this run on my site for a few days and if I like what I see I’ll upgrade it to beta status on PyPI.

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.

So much for Dreamhost

One of the overarching reasons I decided to build Publ the way I did was in order to take advantage of Dreamhost’s support for Passenger WSGI. I was expecting that to be the primary means of hosting my main site (which is way too big for a Heroku instance) and given how smoothly things were working with this site on Dreamhost I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal.

However, there was a huge monkey wrench thrown into things when I switched my site’s configuration over to Passenger; despite all of my configuration being exactly the same between publ.beesbuzz.biz and beesbuzz.biz, the rendition cache on beesbuzz.biz was getting its permissions set wrong, and there was some rather weird behavior with how it was making the temporary files to begin with.

In investigating this I attempted to upgrade my packages on publ.beesbuzz.biz, and all h*ck broke loose.