webmention.js v0.1.0 now on npm

Due to popular demand, there is now an NPM package for webmention.js. So, if you use npm as part of your site JavaScript workflow, now you can theoretically use this.

Thanks to André Jaenisch for his incredibly generous help in getting this set up!

And, if you run into any trouble (or have any suggestions for improvement), please open an issue.

(Full disclosure: I have even more of no idea what I’m doing than usual.)

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

Publ v0.5.10 released

Publ v0.5.10 is now available. The following has changed since v0.5.9:

• Image sets will generate fullsize renditions (and their links) for images which were skipped, so they will still appear in the lightbox
• Footnotes now get rolled up into the entry.more (with some caveats), and also get stable permalinks for their references¹
• You can now annotate an HTML attribute with $ to force it to resolve as an asset (useful for certain JavaScript libraries); see the relevant documentation

I’ve also made a bunch of changes to the sample templates.

Authl v0.3.3

Just a tiny fix in this; it works around an inconsistency between the IndieAuth spec and IndieAuth.com’s implementation. Normally I’d just be all, “this is a bug in IndieAuth.com” but that’s the most popular IndieAuth endpoint right now so I decided it was prudent to make a compromise. And really it’s a good idea to always specify an Accept: header anyway.

Thanks to Colin for bringing this to my attention.

Publ v0.5.9 released

Publ v0.5.9 is now out. Just a couple of bugfixes in this one:

• Login pages now properly redirect to https again (after that was broken due to some of the recent auth-related changes)
• view.range works correctly again, as does everything else that relied on len() on parameter-optional properties (e.g. view.count)

Authl v0.3.2

I’ve now released v0.3.2 of Authl, which adds the following changes:

• Fixed IndieAuth URL validation rules
• Improved UX for login type preview
• Now it supports Twitter on “stateless” hosting

As an experiment I’ve enabled Twitter login on this site, so now you should be able to use it to look at protected entries.

Publ 0.5.8, Authl 0.3.1, and IndieAuth security

So, both Publ and Authl had a pretty naïve issue with the identity verification step of the IndieAuth flow; it simply accepted whatever the authorization endpoint said the user’s identity was. This made it very simple to spoof one’s identity and log in as anyone on any Publ or Authl site.

Authl 0.3.1 fixes the problem with the IndieAuth login flow, and Publ 0.5.8 fixes the problem with the Bearer token flow.

Authl v0.3.0

I just released Authl v0.3.0; minor version bump because of a public API change, to better facilitate stateless storage.

Which is to say I converted most of the handlers to be stateless, which hopefully fixes the issues with running on Heroku.

Unfortunately Twitter couldn’t be fixed easily but I wasn’t running the Twitter handler on this site anyway. I do have some ideas but they’re fairly involved and will have to come later, and not when I’m up way past my bedtime.

Also, there still seems to be some cache-related issue that’s making it necessary to shift-reload the page after logging in or out, sometimes.

Publ v0.5.7, now with theoretical AutoAuth support!

There is only one feature for this new release of Publ, but it’s a big one – there is (theoretical) support for AutoAuth! That’s right, deploy this version and people should be able to magically log on to your website using unattended IndieAuth providers.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any tools that I know of which actually support this mode of operation; all testing has been manual and In Theory.

Fortunately, if someone does want to test AutoAuth (or IndieAuth Bearer authentication in general), you can test it out on this site! You can use this entry as an individual entry, and this category or this feed to see how well it works with the “partial public” path.

Also, this page will tell you all sorts of useful information about the current user (if any).

And I’d might as well use this opportunity to show off the admin dashboard – just sign in as the user test:admin to see how it looks.

EDIT: It looks like there’s a problem with third-party auth due to the way that Heroku works. I should have anticipated this. Third-party auth is temporarily disabled for now. (But this doesn’t affect AutoAuth at least!)

Publ v0.5.6 released

Oops, I’d been sitting on a bunch of bugfixes for a month, which I didn’t notice until I put in another bugfix tonight.

Changes since v0.5.5:

• Fix title sanitization
• Handle category.name with the same formatting options as entry.title
• Replace hand-rolled atomic file operations with atomicwrites
• Add link_class to image renditions
• Fix automatic alt generation for external images
• Simplify the way entry URLs are canonicized
• Fix some bitrot in older tests

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

Publ v0.5.5 released

Howdy y'all! Here’s a new release of Publ for you.

What’s new in this version:

• Add the ability to filter by multiple categories, and also to filter out categories as well
• Various code cleanups, especially around the query generator

Also the unannounced v0.5.4 release was to fix some stuff that broke due to an upstream Arrow change (specifically dealing with them removing an API that I was using to suppress warnings for a different upstream change that I’d already handled).

I should also mention that I’ve updated the beesbuzz.biz template samples to improve IndieWeb and ActivityPub compatibility. (Publ still doesn’t support ActivityPub itself but these changes make it interoperate with Bridgy Fed a bit better.)

On a meta note, I’ve left the microbiology lab I was at; I hope they continue to use Publ, of course! Over the next little while I’m going to spend some more time working on my own things again (including Publ et al), but I’ve also had some interesting job interviews with one of them seeming very likely to turn into an offer. Wish me luck, if you’re into that sort of thing! (And of course, follow my blog for the primary source of this stuff.)

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.

webmention.js security update

So hey, if you’ve been using webmention.js you should probably update it, as there turned out to be an XSS issue found by Checkmention. Better to be safe than sorry etc. etc.

Publ v0.5.3, Authl v0.2.2

I’ve released updates to both Publ and Authl.

On the Authl side:

• Code quality and documentation improvements
• Add an asynchronous client-side lookup thing that tells users how their login will proceed
• Add the redirection target to disposition.Error so that can be preserved correctly
• Update the Flask wrapper to use disposition.Error.redir
• Let the application know the redirection target in render_login_func

On the Publ side:

• If the site is configured to force HTTPS in authentication, force the cookie to be HTTPS-only
• If a user is already logged in, make the login handler redirect them to their destination

For both:

• Improved build scripts to make it less convenient to accidentally push a build from the wrong branch or version

These changes help to keep sites more secure from eavesdroppers, while also hopefully improving the user experience!

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.

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)

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.