Publ: Development Blog

Pushl v0.1.7

Posted (5 years ago)

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!

Installation

An installation guide is available in the project README, but the short version is to make sure you have Python 3 available and then run the following at a command prompt:

pip3 install pushl

which should do everything you need to install it. (On Linux or macOS may need to do sudo pip3 install pushl depending on how your system is set up.)

Some usage ideas

The main use for Pushl is to send Webmention and Pingbacks from any arbitrary blog to link targets, regardless of blogging platform (for example, using Jekyll, Movable Type, Pelican, or, of course, Publ). But it can be used for a lot more than that!

For example, the -e/--entry flag can be used to send webmentions from a specific page; for example:

pushl -e http://example.com/blog/page/12345

And if this page embeds feed discovery tags, you can combine that with -r to also recursively apply to its feeds; for example:

pushl -re http://forum.example.com/

This works especially well with forum software such as phpBB and XenForo, both of which support feed discovery. And this will help website publishers to know when their content is being discussed, with forum posts appearing as “pingbacks” on their site!

Of course, when using it with a forum or a sporadically-updating blog or whatever you’ll probably want it to be in a cron job. There’s more information about how to set that up in the project README.