Integrating Openring into this Blog

| programming | python | blogging |

I just did the jenkiest thing ever.

Openring is a cool little library written by Drew DeVault which allows you to add articles from feeds that you follow to your own blog. It’s kind of like a dynamic blog roll.

It was designed for static site generators, but since (for some reason) this blog is not statically generated, I was thinking of the best way to include it and came up with something that is either a horrible RCE waiting to happen, or a clever hack.

I set up a cron job to run openring every eight hours and pop the output to a file. Then in flask, I made a simple utility function to go find and read this file and insert it into a Jinja variable which is then rendered on every post page (look down at the bottom).

This allows readers to check out other interesting content and also has the added benefit of being fresh several times per day.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

“You hold down Control, Shift, Alt, and click Technical Support. And boom.”

(It’s Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.) Imagine this: It’s 8pm on a rainy Sunday night in the ’90s, and you’re bored, so you boot up the family computer looking for something to do. But you’ve already played...

via Unsung October 24, 2026

City Escape

This last week I did an extended weekend trip with some friends to Nasu in Tochigi Prefecture. Had our fill of dairy products. Cheesecakes, yogurt, and milk. The milk tasted to me more like the milk I’d have in the US, than the more creamy that tends to be...

via Longest Voyage October 24, 2026

Manuel Moreale

Writer, web developer

via Uses This October 24, 2026

Generated by openring