News and updates about Publ
I’ve released v0.3.7, which just fixes a few issues around transaction management and overall indexing performance. Namely:
I just released v0.3.6 of Publ, which just allows it to work with databases other than SQLite. In particular this is part of testing more advanced heroku deployment options.
Right now I’m primarily focusing on improving the documentation, especially the quickstart guide, since people are finally showing interest in Publ but aren’t quite sure where to begin!
I’ve now released v0.3.5 of Publ. Changelog:
view.deleted)I’ve also updated the sample site templates with all of the changes that have happened since, uh, June, and also included some sample content so it’s easier to get started with it.
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.
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.)
Turns out I never actually tested the If-Modified-Since handler, because if I had I’d have seen the glaring exception it threw.
Oh well, that’s fixed now. I think.
I’ve started working on Pushl in earnest now, and one thing that was really bugging me about this is that anything which polls feeds and entries would really benefit from having client-side cache control working. Which was a big missing feature in Publ.
Well, I finally implemented it, and I’m pretty happy with how I did it.
The short version: for any given view it figures out (pessimistically) what’s the most recent file that would have affected the view (well, within reason; it only looks at the current template rather than any included templates, which is pretty difficult to do correctly) and uses that to generate an ETag (via metadata fingerprint) and a Last-Modified time (based either on the file modification time or the time the entry was actually published).
There’s probably a few corner cases this misses but in general this makes client-side caching of feeds and such work nicely.
So, for the last couple of days I’ve been playing with some of the IndieWeb concepts, in particular Webmention. Spurred on by a helpful thread with Kevin Marks, I took some time to actually do a rough implementation of outgoing Webmentions, and also did some of the work to set up the h-card and h-entry microformats on my main site.
As far as I can tell, it works great, but I’m also not going to actually merge this to master or push it to production. Read on to see why!
I found a few more annoying bugs that were shaken out from the whole PonyORM transition, as well as a couple of bugs in the new shape functionality. There’s probably a few more of these bugs lurking in the codebase (I mean, in addition to the existing bugs I know about), but here’s what’s changed:
FileNotFound handling on images (so shape errors propagate correctly)img_class and class work correctly per the documentation
Did you know that CSS3 has a style called shape-outline? It’s pretty neat, it makes it so that a floated object gets a shape based on the alpha channel of its specified image. But it’s kind of a pain to set up; in plain HTML it looks something like this:
<img src="/path/to/image.png" width="320" height="320" style="shape-outline:url('/path/to/image.png');float: left">
and if you want a different shape mask for your image than its own alpha channel, you have to do a bunch of stuff like making sure that the image sizes are the same and whatever.
Version 0.3.0 is now released, with the change from peewee to PonyORM.
As a result of this change you’ll have to do two things to your config file:
Everything else should work identically as before.
For a number of reasons, I have replaced the backing ORM. Previously I was using peewee, but now I’m using PonyORM. The primary reason for this is purely ideological; I do not want to use software which is maintained by someone with a track record of toxic behavior. peewee’s maintainer responds to issues and feature requests with shouting and dismissive snark; PonyORM’s maintainer responds with helpfulness and grace. I am a strong proponent of the latter.
PonyORM’s API is also significantly more Pythonic, and rather than abusing operator overloads for clever query building purposes, it abuses Python’s AST functionality to parse actual Python expressions into SQL queries. Seriously, look at this explanation of it and tell me that isn’t just amazing.
Earlier today I pushed v0.2.2, which was a minor configuration fix for the markdown library to support table syntax.
Then I pushed v0.2.2.1 which was another configuration fix to fix that fix (oops).
Then in deploying updates I upgraded to Python 3.7, and promptly discovered that Publ doesn’t actually work on Python 3.7, so just now I fixed that, and released the fixes as v0.2.3.
Just a couple of minor fixes in this release:
math-explicit extension on Misaka, because it did pretty much the opposite of what the name impliedA few changes since v0.1.24:
Publ itself is stable enough (and enough has changed since v0.1.0) that I felt that a minor version bump was a reasonable thing to do.
Anyway! While Publ has been running quite nicely on my website, I’d love to see more people actively using and developing it. This site in particular needs a lot of attention and probably reworking; my other top priorities are:
So, sorry to anyone who was subscribed to the RSS feed for this and got spammed with v0.1.24 release announcements. I made a mistake and pushed a version of the entry that didn’t have a canonical ID assigned yet, and as a result, every time Heroku spun up, it assigned a new ID. This is something that’s happened before and I really ought to do something about it.
Three things come to mind:
2 seems like the easiest approach for now, so that’s what I’ll probably do.
New functionality:
Bug fixes:
entry.title can now accept the no_smartquotes parameter, which is necessary in Atom feedsentry.card now uses the same Markdown extensions as entry.bodyI neglected to mention that I set Publ to beta status in v0.1.22, which was a minor bugfix release, rather than moving to 0.2 like I previously stated. The changes for 0.1.22 were:
Sort-NameAnd then the changes for 0.1.23:
no_smartquotes=True to entry.body/entry.more/entry.title)Last-Modified header which only gets set when you want it to be)I released some of my site templates; hopefully this will be helpful to others.
This server is now running Publ v0.1.21, which I believe will be the final beta version; all of the release blockers have been taken care of. And as a bonus I also implemented the ability to include template fragments, which allows templates' content to change formatting based on the category of the formatted entries. This is particularly useful on Atom feeds, where you might want to have different entry formats for each category. I’m already using it on busybee, to provide full-content feeds in ways that make sense for the different site sections.
I will play with this for a few days and if I’m happy with it I’ll be releasing v0.2.0, which will be the first beta release. In the meantime I’ll also look into packaging up busybee’s templates for other people to use as a starting point, because I know that setting up a new site right now can be incredibly overwhelming!