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.

Lots of bug fixes, and more image features (v0.1.17)

Oh, it’s been a little while since I’ve posted an update, hasn’t it? That’s because I’ve been very busy building the templates for my personal site! In doing so I’ve greatly improved the way that view refinements worked, fixed a few silly bugs with image search paths on templates, and also added an easier way to specify background images in CSS, via the image().get_css_background() method.

I’m really excited to be able to bring my first fully-realized Publ site to the public; I hope it gets other people interested in what a flexible publishing system allows them to do!

Template overrides and breadcrumbs

Today I added two new useful features:

• template overrides (including private templates)
• hierarchy breadcrumbs

I also implemented the better date sort mentioned previously.

These things are already making my new personal site look way better and easier to use! I feel like I’m almost ready to flip the switch.

Oh, and I also improved the getting started guide, including adding basic setup instructions for Linux and Windows. Not that I’ve gotten Publ to run on Windows, yet, but documenting how to get the environment set up is the first step, right?

Dates are hard

There’s an old joke in programming, that the two hardest things to do are naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors. But this doesn’t pay sufficient respect to one of the other hardest things, namely handling date and time.

Asynchronous workers

Today I got two major bits of functionality in: Publ will now asynchronously scan the content index (which speeds up startup and fixes some annoying race conditions with entry creation), and it also asynchronously generates image renditions (which makes pages not take forever to load on first render, and will also use multiple CPU cores if available). Seems to work well so far.

I was running into scaling problems with beesbuzz.biz (what with there being a couple thousand entries and some pages with hundreds of images on it) and this keeps it feeling pretty good.

So, this brings us up to version 0.1.14.

v0.1.13 released

Two major updates for v0.1.13:

• Rewrote the pagination logic to actually work across category-recursive views, and to support pagination where the sort order isn’t necessarily the same between renders
• Refactored images so that the template image() function has access to the tag writer

These changes were made as part of migrating beesbuzz.biz over to Publ, which I’ve made a lot of progress on now. It’s pretty nice getting my overall design proven out, and to shake out all the little bugs and misfeatures.

Hopefully soon I’ll have Publ in a state where I feel comfortable releasing it as beta.

v0.1.12 changes

I just released v0.1.12 which adds a couple of quick, minor-ish fixes to Unicode handling; in particular:

• UTF-8-containing headers no longer get MIME-mangled on first import
• I finally made the automatic slug text way better by switching to awesome-slugify

So, now it’s no longer US-English-centric, at least. Right now it just uses the defaults; at some point I’ll want to make it so that you can configure a site’s or entry’s language locale so that things work better on that end too.

Now with ∞% more OpenGraph support

I have now implemented the basic OpenGraph API to Publ, so now a template can generate an OpenGraph card with entry.card. So in theory when this entry gets autoposted to Twitter, this first paragraph should appear, as should the below image:

Anyway that’s what’s new in v0.1.11 (as well as a bunch of internal refactoring to support this addition).

Even more updates, v0.1.10 released

If you are reading this, it means that Publ v0.1.10 is out. This release is mostly about a few cleanups, such as:

• No longer nests a <div> for an image gallery inside of a containing <p> (which both fixes an HTML validation error and makes styling more controllable)
• Cleans up error handling somewhat
• Also cleans up a bunch of code for property caching

But there’s also a new feature, namely view.range, which you can read about over in the API docs.

I am also making significant progress in porting my main website over to Publ and hopefully I’ll have something to show for it soon. (And I promise it looks way nicer than this site!)

The Trouble with PHP

I’ve had people ask me why I’m not building Publ using PHP. While much has been written on this subject from a standpoint of what’s wrong with the language (and with which I agree quite a lot!), that isn’t, to me, the core of the problem with PHP on the web.

So, I want to talk a bit about some of the more fundamental issues with PHP, which actually goes back well before PHP even existed and is intractibly linked with the way PHP applications themselves are installed and run.

(I will be glossing over a lot of details here.)

Well, that was embarrassing…

So, note to self: library version pinning is a good idea. I should also learn how to properly manage my library version dependencies.

Thanks to @therealtakeshi for bringing this to my attention!

Image renditions are complete!

Not a lot to say, just that all my intended image rendition functions work now (historical note: this entry was back when the Publ site included the test suite, which is no longer the case).

I really need to stop dragging my feet on migrating beesbuzz.biz over, because there is absolutely no excuse now.

Anyway, this ups the Publ version to 0.1.5. Have fun.

More API changes, version 0.1.4 released

I’ve released version 0.1.4 of Publ, which makes the following major changes:

• limit has been changed to count in the API (for more consistency and clarity)
• Similarly, on image sets, limit is now count and limit_offset is now count_offset
• More template functions now support positional (rather than keyword) parameters; this has yet to be documented however

And on this site I’ve split out the manual to put the various template object APIs into their own category, although the organization of the documentation is still h*ckin' messy.

Now working on Heroku!

Converting Publ into a pip-installable library ended up making the Heroku deployment really easy. While the main site is running on Dreamhost, there is an instance on Heroku as well, which seems to be running reliably (although if it gets hammered with activity I assume Heroku will shut it down until I start actually paying them money).

There’s a few pluses and minuses to Heroku compared to traditional hosting on a persistent server (such as Dreamhost).

Getting closer to usefulness

I finally separated out Publ-the-library from the main Publ website files, and released v0.1.0 on PyPI, making this the first time I’ve released anything there. Woo!

Here’s some cat pictures for you

There are 21 more cat pictures!

We have basic image renditions!!!

Check out this image:

Check out this tinier version of the image:

If you have a high-DPI screen, notice how the tinier version is sharper!

Lots of code cleanups

I threw PyLint at the code. Then I cleaned everything up.

This blog entry is really just to test the fixes to make sure everything works. Seems fine.

Added some basic caching

Instead of working on image renditions I decided to try adding in some caching functionality, and experimented with both functools.lru_cache and Flask-Cache. Neither is a particularly great solution to caching but they get the job done.

Frequently Asked Questions, April 2018 edition

I was just on a few days' business trip for my augmented reality startup (we just released a new app, by the way! check it out, it’s free and fun) and so I haven’t had time to work on Publ for a bit. But I’ve been getting a bunch of questions about Publ, so I figured I should answer some of them!

EDIT: Moved this into its own page on the main site.