Some time ago I wrote about using “Cloudflare Workers”, first as a way of adding Content-Security-Policy headers to your pages (when you don’t have other easy ways of doing it) and after I even built an easy to deploy DDNS solution on top of them.
This time I just used this tool to build a “planet” software. You might be wondering about what is a planet, so I will try to explain it in a simple and practical way: A planet is a web page (and RSS feed) that gathers content about a specific topic from multiple other sources and displays them in a chronological order, using the feeds provided by those sources.
If you prefer, you can check Wikipedia’s entry about it.
This is specially useful if you want to cover all the content and activity of a given community in an open way (without extra intermediaries or curators). A few examples are:
There are other software available for this purpose, such as moonmoon, but if you don’t want to manage a server just for this purpose, Cloudflare workers can be very useful.
So I built worker-planet in order to easily create these community pages without having to worry with managing servers. There are many improvements that can be added, but the base functionality is there, and many configurations and theming options are already supported.
The project is open-source and free (as in freedom) software, so please test it and use it as you wish.