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

“It Gives Great Demo”

There’s that famous video of Steve Jobs explaining why they don’t didn’t make touchscreen MacBooks: We thought about [a touch screen MacBook] years ago. We’ve done tons of user testing on this and it turns out it doesn’t work! Touch surfaces don’t want to...

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog November 4, 2026

On the road for 8 months: Retrospective

My Trip around the world is now almost 8 months-in. Crazy to look back at the times and all the (36!) Countries I’ve visited, sometimes a day, sometimes almost 2-months! I have now turned 26, and am writing this blog on a phone in a café in Warsaw, Poland....

via Junwoo Hwang November 4, 2026

The Trump Era is Collapsing and Big Tech is Officially On Notice

Cycles Hyped No More on November 4, 2026 The American electorate has spoken. And it’s not just MAGA Trumpism which has been repudiated, but the unseemly reign of douchebag techbroism. Cycles Hyped No More is a monthly column by Jared White where he takes a...

via The Internet Review November 4, 2026

Generated by openring