Gonçalo Valério

Tag: rss planet

  • New release of worker-planet

    Two years ago, I made a small tool on top of Cloudflare’s Workers to generate a single feed by taking input from multiple RSS sources, a kind of aggregator or planet software as it was usually known a few years ago. You can read more about it here and here.

    This is a basic tool that is meant to be easy to deploy. The codebase itself doesn’t need too much maintenance.

    However, after all this time, the code started to become outdated to the point it could become unusable soon, since the ecosystem has moved on.

    So during this last week, I did a few upgrades and released a new version. The changes include:

    • It now uses a recent version of wrangler.
    • The development workflow was updated.
    • A new example template was added.
    • A new template helper and new context data were added to help with the development of new templates.

    You can grab a copy here. Any bugs or improvements, feel free to create new issues on the GitHub repository or contribute with new patches.

  • worker-planet was awarded a swag box

    If you remember, back in June/July I worked on a small project to make it easy to build small community pages that aggregate content produced from many sources. As I shared in the post, worker-planet was built to run on “Cloudflare Workers” without the need to manage a server yourself.

    A short time afterwards I noticed that Cloudflare was running a challenge for developers to build on top of their tools/services. So I submitted worker-planet, since it already complied with all requirements.

    Email received, informing that one of the swag boxes was awarded.

    Today I found out that it was awarded one of the 300 prizes.

    That’s cool, at least I’m not the only one that finds it useful. Perhaps I should fix some of the existing issues and improve the project (like better instructions and more themes?).

    If you haven’t tried it, please do and let me know what you think. If you are better than me (the bar is very low) at building custom themes, feel free to contribute one, I would appreciate.

    I will try to release a new version early in 2022.

  • worker-planet

    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.