Big new releases for Publ and Authl!
Publ changes:
Authl changes:
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.
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.
I’ve released Authl v0.1.7, which now adds direct support for IndieAuth (rather than requiring IndieLogin.com as a broker). This means that now folks who have an IndieAuth identity can log in using that; previously I was expecting IndieLogin.com to eventually open up client registrations to make that a useful authentication path, but for various reasons Aaron hasn’t opened it up to the general public.
Part of this update was to also refactor how OAuth is handled, so it’ll be a lot easier for me to add more OAuth-based providers in the future; hopefully I’ll have direct support for Twitter, GitHub, and maybe even Facebook in the near-ish future. But for now, between Mastodon, email, and IndieAuth, I think I have all of my own personal needs taken care of.
Feel free to make suggestions for other identity providers in the Authl issue tracker, though!
Are you using webmention.io as your webmention endpoint? Want to get your incoming webmentions displayed on your website?
Well you’re in luck, I wrote a simple-ish script for that. (You’ll probably also want to see the accompanying stylesheet too.) And it doesn’t even require that you use Publ – it should work with any CMS, static or dynamic. The only requirement is that you use either webmention.io or something that has a similar enough retrieval API.
I wrote more about it on my blog, where you can also see it in use. For now, I’m just going to use the sample site repository to manage it (and issues against it).
It’s MIT-licensed, so feel free to use it wherever and however you want and to modify it for your needs. I might improve it down the road but for now it’s mostly just a quick itch-scratching hack that does things the way I want it to.
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.
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.)
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!