iBlog

Simple internal blogging/PPP solution, originally developed by @stilkov and @pgh. iBlog is currently maintained by @mjansing.

Security note

Authors have full control of the HTML of their individual blog post. There is no protection against, e.g., CSRF attacks. If you don't trust your authors, don't use this software.

Getting Started

create config/database.yml based on config/database.template.yml or config/database.template_sqlite.yml
set up database: bundle exec rake db:drop db:create db:migrate db:seed
launch server: rails server

Contributing

Please use pull requests.

Interface to the rest of the world

Auth

iBlog will look for (and blindly trust) the REMOTE_USER HTTP header. The content of this header is the "handle" of the user doing the particular request. It is assumed that iBlog is deployed behind some reverse proxy that duely authenticates users, sets this header, and makes sure nobody from the outside can set it. If a request hits iBlog without REMOTE_USER set, the hard-coded username guest is used, which is convenient for local testing on a development machine.

For best results, handles should consist of all lower-case letters.

If you do use upper case letters, you are fine as long as no two handles differ only by case.

Author names

We have a database table that basically maps the user names (as handed in by REMOTE_USER) to the full author names and author avatar URIs.

There is a rake task authors:update that retrieves such data via a JSON list and updates the database. This you can use to sync iBlog with the avatar service database, e.g., once a day.

The task expects one or three task parameters, namely, the URI and (if needed) the user and password required to access that URI. Either file:, http:, or https: - URIs can be used.

What is retrieved from that URI is parsed as a JSON file, which should have the following format:

{
  "members": {
    "handle1": {"displayName":"Jane Author", "avatar_scaled":"http://avatar.service.org/jane_author.jpg"},
    "handle2": {"displayName":"Simon Shy"},
    ...
  }
}

The members level is mandatory.
Any additional information in your JSON file will be ignored, with no harm done (expect using a bit of RAM for a moment).
Handle values should be lower-case only. As mentioned, this is the same as provided in the REMOTE_USER header.
If you leave out the avatar_scaled field for some handle, or leave out a certain handle's record alltogether, that author's avatar is removed and replaced with the default one.

You can find a slightly longer sample input file at test/integration/update_authors_test.data.

Naveed

iBlog provides Atom feeds for its content. Some folks prefer email (or short text messages or whatever), in particular, when some new comment appears regarding some discussion they took part in earlier.

iBlog does not send out such notifications itself, but leaves that job to Naveed (or any other service presenting the same interface as explained below).

Whenever a new comment appears, iBlog checks whether the environment variable IBLOG_NAVEED_URI and IBLOG_NAVEED_TOKEN both exist. When one of them doesn't, nothing happens and all is well (which may be what you want in your development environment if you're up to different things). If both do exist, a POST is attempted to the IBLOG_NAVEED_URI (assumed to be HTTPS (or, if you must, HTTP)). That POST has headers (among others)

Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Authorization: Bearer xxx

(where xxx is replaced with the IBLOG_NAVEED_TOKEN content) and the content form has the text field sender, one or more recipient, a subject and, finally, a body. If you can't already guess what those are, let us mention that sender and recipient are whatever iBlog received in the REMOTE_USER headers (it's Naveed's job to figure out actual contact points).

During unavailability of the Naveed service, update notifications are lost.

martinei/iBlog