Pushl v0.2.14, Authl v0.3.4

Double-whammy release today.

Pushl v0.2.13

I’ve released a new version of Pushl.

Changes since the last version:

• Added support for tracking entry URL changes
• Finally got around to adding type annotations and static analysis

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.

Pushl v0.2.12

I have now released Pushl v0.2.12. The following is new:

• It now respects rel="canonical" or rel="self" when determining which URL to send a WebSub ping for
• You can now send self-pings using the --self-pings parameter
• Miscellaneous code cleanups

Pushl v0.2.11

In trying to fix what looked like a bug in Pushl (which turned out to be a bug in one of the services I was pinging), I did a bunch of much-needed code cleanup and refactoring.

I also added the ability to ping the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for outgoing links if the target has changed (relative to the usual If-Modified-Since/If-None-Match tests).

Pushl will now also log warnings for two useful situations:

• An outgoing link generates a 400-class error (403/404/410/etc.)
• An outgoing webmention has a different canonical URL than what’s being pinged (improved since v0.2.8)

The way it handles canonical URLs is also now improved; if a page has <link rel="canonical"> it will use that, otherwise it will use the final URL that is the result of chasing redirects.

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.

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.

Pushl v0.2.5 (not a joke!)

I have released v0.2.5 of Pushl. The changes since v0.2.4:

• Improved the logging levels a bunch, making them more useful
• Added the ability to only send WebSub for feeds

The latter improvement makes it so that if your site is accessible from multiple URLs (e.g. http and https, or multiple domain names), it won’t send multiple Webmentions to everyone with each possible URL. This helps to cut down on spamminess to sites which don’t detect multi-origin pings (such as most IndieWeb blogs or fed.brid.gy).

I also finally added a tools page to this website, to collect useful things that make Publ work better with other things. I also intend to add various useful quality-of-life things like an image cropping tool, and whatever else might occur to me down the road.

Someday I need to get around to making a proper “Features” page for this site, too. Someday…

Pushl v0.2.4, now with a proper user-agent

While trying to figure out some weird access patterns on the day-job site I had the realization Pushl wasn’t actually specifying a user-agent, so it was just coming through as the generic aiohttp one, which isn’t very friendly.

Now it sends a reasonable user-agent by default, and this can be overridden by the --user-agent flag if you want to for your own analytics or whatever.

Oh, and I had quietly released 0.2.3 a few days ago; there were just some minor internal changes to logging and also declaring Pushl as beta, rather than alpha, software.

Pushl 0.2.2

I’ve done a bunch more work on Pushl to try to get it more stable. In particular, I’ve made it so that it will only recurse into feeds that are on domains that were declared in the initial requests, and I seem to have cleared up some cases which were causing it to hang and also added a global timeout which will, hopefully, prevent it from hanging indefinitely.

I do wish I could figure out what is causing the hangs when they do happen though. Oh well. Some discussion of the issue below the cut.

Pushl v0.2.1 released

I’ve been working on getting Pushl much more stable and reliable, particularly around a persistent “too many open files” error I was having, which turned out to be primarily due to a fd leak in the caching routines. Oops.

Anyway, there’s also seemingly a problem with how aiohttp manages its connection pool, at least on macOS, so I’ve disabled connection keep-alive by default. However, if you still want to use keep-alive, there’s now a --keepalive option to allow you to do that. I’m finding that it doesn’t really improve performance all that much anyway.

This is feeling beta-ready but I’ll give it a few days for other issues to shake out first.

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.

Pushl v0.1.7

I ended up doing some more work on Pushl and have now released v0.1.7. The major changes:

• Did a bunch of refactoring to make the code a little cleaner and handle configuration more appropriately
• Added a configurable timeout for connections (which now defaults to 15)
• Added a --version option on the command line arguments

Also, some suggested usage ideas below the cut!

Pushl v0.1.6 released

It’s been a while since I’ve updated Pushl but today I released v0.1.6. It includes the following fixes:

• Now it supports Pingback as well as Webmention
• Improved the threading defaults and connection pooling
• Also checks entries for updates even if the feed didn’t change (in case something changed in the more text or page metadata or whatever)

Anyway, it should just be a pip install --upgrade pushl (or pipenv update) away.

Pushl v0.1.5

While I’m fixing random stuff in Publ, I figured I’d finally fix some problems with Pushl too. Nothing major here, just:

• Stability: Fixed a bug where feeds that don’t declare links caused the worker to die before entries got processed
• Performance: Now we use a global connection pool (so connections can be reused)
• Fixed a minor correctness issue with archive feeds (which actually doesn’t make any difference in the real world but whatever)

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.

Pushl 0.1.0 released

I’ve gotten Pushl to the point that I’m confident in releasing it as a full alpha and having a cron job run it every 15 minutes. Whew.

I’ve also added some h-entry markup to the Publ site templates so that hopefully the notifications appear at least somewhat reasonably elsewhere.

I really need to redo these site templates now that I have a better idea of how they go together. Also the quickstart guide could be a lot better.

Pushl 0.0.1 released

I finally got around to releasing a very rough prototype of Pushl to pypi. It only sends out WebSub notifications for now (does anyone even use those?), but I’ll work on actually implementing WebMention soon.

Also, recently someone pointed out to me fed.brid.gy which makes it easy to turn a static site into an ActivityPub source. At some point I’ll experiment with setting up Publ for this; it looks like it’s just a matter of adding a couple of additional route rules to Publ, so that will probably go into an advanced configuration guide if I ever get around to making such a thing. (Or it could actually be added to Publ directly but there isn’t much of a reason for that, IMO.)