RubberStamp 2.0
Profiled, tidied up some of the layout handling related to rotated text and created the installer.

Rubberstamp 2.0 is live!

Next things to fix:

1. Handle Type 0 fonts


2. Handle Form XObjects

A quick diversion first to handle territorial restrictions (not all books will be available everywhere).

T

Labels: pdf, release, text, Tools

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 3:13 PM 0 comments

 
Bugfixes
Two releases in one day...

Release 7.3.1 has just gone up. This neatens up the interaction of global preview with

• Rolling archives (where everything up to N months ago is free to all anyway), and


• Gateway forms, where you can complete a form to obtain unrestricted access to a particular issue.

We also fixed

• Google ads when displayed against fit-to-width pages. They now stay in place rather than getting squashed below the page images.

and added

• Support for access to titles through /isbn/XXXXXXXX . That's not a real ISBN.

T

Labels: projects, release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 5:34 PM 0 comments

 
Global Preview
Release 7.3 has just gone live. This moves everyone over to the new access control model (parameter-based rather than cookies).

Now that that's in place we've also graduated to "Global Preview" - people browsing in our shop can search the complete archives of all of our titles. Results are presented in our standard list of cropped page images. The click-through takes you to the thumbnail view of the pages, with an invitation to buy a subscription for full access.

All front covers and contents pages are available at full size so you can see what you're missing. The text of these also feeds into Google to help readers find the content.

T

Labels: projects, release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 1:16 PM 0 comments

 
Parameter-based access control
is now up and running on the site - but applies only to admins at this point. Will roll it out to everyone once I've tested everything.

Had to update the clipper so that it knows how to retrieve the page images under the new approach.

It's quite cool to be able to grab a page image URL and access it directly in another browser - for about a minute. After that the timestamp parameter automatically expires the link and we deny access. There might be opportunities there for use in promotions? Could generate links to page images with one-month expiry etc. These could then be served without any login preamble.

T

Labels: release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 4:10 PM 0 comments

 
Release 7.1
Adds support for public page ranges - sections of a book can now be opened to the public, while retaining the zoom limit for the rest of the title. The text of the public pages can be sucked into Google, and we present named links to the public sections on the book's marketing page.

Also, the library login link for each title is presented on its publisher's marketing materials page.

T

Labels: release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 5:35 PM 0 comments

 
Release 6.10.1
Revises our cookie syntax in preparation for the new Tomcat deployment.

T

Labels: release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 12:23 PM 0 comments

 
Release 6.10
Finally moves the "about" pages from static files to the db. This allows us to create custom about sections for the themed sites - in particular we can roll out the FAQ in French.

Implemented associated editors on the admin side, a basic templating system (so we can put placeholders into the text which will be resolved at request time) and hooked AboutSections back to a default theme. This is so that if you request an about page which isn't part of your current theme (maybe you followed a link from Google), we can show you the content in an appropriate design.

Set up apache rewrites from the old about page URLs to their new addresses.

T

Labels: release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 12:51 PM 0 comments

 
Release 6.9.12
Adds support for publisher access to gateway form results, also option to export tab-separated results.

T

Labels: release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 5:42 PM 0 comments

 
Release 6.9.11
New features:

1. Sans-serif option in template themes


2. Bug fix: don't display text if your subscription doesn't allow full page zoom.

T

Labels: release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 12:33 PM 0 comments

 
Release 6.9.8
fixes a small but annoying bug, where if you had expired or cancelled subscriptions in your account they could cause you to get stuck in an endless loop of login pages. Now you see our "you have no subscriptions" message as you would expect.

T

Labels: release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 2:57 PM 0 comments

 
Release 6.9.7
Adds support for downloadable PDFs, basket tweaks.

T

Labels: pdf, release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 12:36 PM 0 comments

 
Text next
Live servers are now patched with to make curl work properly with Shibboleth.

Release 6.9.5 has just gone live; this fixes a cookie problem for those with lots of subscriptions (say a couple of hundred).

Next project is to make the text of certain magazine/book pages available directly on our web pages; good for accessibility, Google and flexible printing.

Side note of things to be added to the next web server AMI:

1. curl patch


2. tweaked sendmail config

T

Labels: AMI, projects, release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 3:35 PM 0 comments

 
Release 6.8.9
New release is live - this adds:

1. Improved file handling (don't retrieve page images from S3 unless we really need them).


2. Eternal disk caching for S3 objects - objects no longer expire automatically.


3. Per-issue cache expiry on demand through a new admin toolbar

The Catapult tool now has support for MD5 generation but it doesn't use this yet - turns out that Amazon's eTag is explictly an MD5 of your content and this does correspond with the digests I'm calculating for the sample files. We can use this when checking for changed content in rsyncs and don't need to store our own MD5 as metadata for the object.

Checked ACLs for the bucket and test objects, those are fine - full_access for the owner and nothing more.

Finally to enable logging, then upload a live title and switch it over.

T

Labels: caching, release, s3

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 5:21 PM 0 comments

 
Release 6.8.8
went live on Friday afternoon. This is the first public release of the Shibboleth link - there's a new option to log in "via institution". We're using the UK Federation's WAYF service for now; will implement a custom directory service when we support a client outside the federation.

For the moment it's time to shift focus onto the S3 migration. The site is now pulling all wordmaps, links, keywords, feature lists and page images from the appropriate service. There may still be a few locations which refer explicitly to local page images (cover thumbnails are a case in point) but there's enough there for testing.

Initial testing reveals that retrieval of uncached pages is too slow, owing to the round-trip between servers as we calculate the link rectangles. Once cached, the timing is fine.

T

Labels: release, s3, shibboleth

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 11:03 PM 0 comments

 
Release 6.8.7
is live now - this adds provisional support for S3 hosting. I've swapped a disused title over to the new scheme and am uploading its data to S3. Testing tomorrow.

T

Labels: release, s3

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 1:09 AM 0 comments

 
Release 6.8.6
this just adds the extra path for shibboleth-based login. The site's now configured to pass all such requests through shibd, while leaving other login requests alone.

This is now working through the test IdP, though I did have to modify the tomcat config to get it to pick up on the REMOTE_USER variable set by shibd: set tomcatAuthentication to false so that tomcat receives the variable propagated by apache.

So: you can now make a login request to our site, get redirected to an identity provider and redirected back to us. The login code will see your authenticated identity (well, enough to decide whether or not to grant access) and will log you into the site.

Remaining work: register our service provision details with the federation, integrate their metadata and offer a directory/where-are-you-from service from our login page. Getting there...

T

Labels: config, release, shibboleth

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 3:35 PM 0 comments

 
Elision
Wow - was that really a week since the last post? Lots of things going on...

New site release is up (6.8.5). Features:

Improved login consistency - dropped the idea of a "theme" parameter being passed around, instead it's all now based on the title you're trying to access. If you came to the login page because you need to authenticate to see the page you requested, we base the login page theme on the theme of the title concerned. The title id is passed to the Forgotten Password page and back again to keep everything consistent.

All logins are now handled by the dedicated login processor. Previously the situation described above (you need to login to see what you requested) was handled by the page browser or issue browser - this led to inconsistencies where the preparation work done by our login processor wasn't taking place, so some options weren't getting offered to the user.

The year browser on the site's more accurate - we used to page your issue list into rigid chunks of 12 per page, then take you to the page containing the start of the requested year. Now we fine-tune the page start so it coincides exactly with the first issue from that year. This was a particular client request.

Some theme work for the same reason.

The load-balancer config's been updated to ensure that sessions are consistent across http and https requests.

Shibd still up and running in the test configuration. Waiting for confirmation from the federation before switching to a live config.

Also, imports and the regular monthly routines.

Going to clear remaining emails and dedicate today to getting S3 up and running for a test title.

T

Labels: projects, release, s3

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 10:41 AM 0 comments

 
Release 6.8.3
Fixes the bug with French renewal notices (we now auto-select the correct shop based on the subscription you're trying to renew).

Back to getting Shibboleth up and running with our new certificate.

T

Labels: release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 3:24 PM 0 comments

 
Release 6.8.2
Release 6.8.2 has just gone live. This adds title-specific login pages, so you could direct someone to

/login/peerage

or

/login/timeoutlondon

and they'll see a page tailored for that publication. We pick up the publication name and any branding (logo, favicon, colours).

This is particularly aimed at librarians, so that they can add the appropriate link to their catalogue. Library users who might have been confused by our generic login page can now see exactly what it is they're trying to access, and be reassured that they've arrived at the right site.

T

Labels: library cards, release

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 12:47 PM 0 comments

 
Release 6.8.1
Release 6.8.1 has just gone live on the site. New features in this release:

Library card logins

The institutional login system now supports library cards, so members of a library can log in from any machine - not just their nominated IP range.

Revised login page

There's a new Javascript switcher to offer a selection of login methods. You'll always see "username" and "library card"; depending on your location you may see "IP" in the list too.

If your browser doesn't support Javascript you'll see all the options at once, stacked from top to bottom.

Experimental Shibboleth support

The bit that links your authenticated Shibboleth login to an existing account is in place. Not yet in place: live site Shibboleth configuration and WAYF service.

T

Labels: library cards, release, shibboleth

- posted by Tim Bruce @ 12:41 AM 0 comments