Publisher 1.0.0: sign up with your email address

Three days after its first public release, Publisher has reached version 1.0.0, and our free service already runs it. The biggest change for you: you no longer need a GitHub or Google account to use it.

Sign up with your email address

On the sign-in page, choose Sign up and enter your email address and name. We send you a link, and on the page it opens you choose your password. Until you follow the link, the account cannot be used, so nobody can sign up with an address that is not theirs.

• Strong passwords, without odd rules. A password needs at least 12 characters. Instead of forcing you to mix digits and symbols, Publisher estimates how hard it is to guess, and turns down common passwords, keyboard patterns and your own email address. Passwords are stored only as a hash, never in readable form.
• Forgot your password? Request a link from the sign-in page; it is valid for one hour. Changing your password signs you out on every other device.
• Protected against guessing. Sign-up and the password forms are protected by a captcha, and after several failed sign-ins, signing in takes a captcha too.

Signing in with GitHub or Google works as before. Colleagues you want to invite need an account first, with either method.

Also new since the first release

• See which jobs people click. The links to your jobs in your feed now lead through Publisher, which counts each click and forwards the visitor to your job page. The dashboard shows the clicks of the last 30 days, the most clicked jobs and the countries the clicks come from. No IP address is stored. Once a job is no longer published, its link shows a page saying the position is no longer advertised, even if a job board still has an old copy of your feed.
• A dashboard that tells you what to do. Under Needs attention you find jobs that close soon, jobs that are active but cannot be published because something is missing, and drafts nobody has touched in a while. When you start without an employer or without jobs, the dashboard tells you the next step.
• Permalinks give your feed an address that never changes. You can switch which feed it publishes, or take all your jobs offline at once, without touching your website.
• Ready-made webserver configuration. The permalink’s page now shows the configuration to serve your jobs at /.well-known/ojobpub.json on your own domain, as a redirect or a reverse proxy, for Apache, nginx and Caddy. Copy it and hand it to whoever looks after your website.

The full list of changes is in the changelog on GitHub.

Running your own copy

If you run Publisher yourself, email and password sign-up is off until you configure it, and it needs an SMTP server to send its mail. Note that job links through Publisher are on by default: the job URLs in your feed change once when you upgrade. Set app.clicks.enabled=false to keep publishing your own job pages. The README explains the settings.

As always, tell us what works for you and what gets in your way: open an issue on GitHub, or reach us on Mastodon.