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

“From digital mischief to outright destruction”

The 1980s and 1990s PC viruses were a special breed. The MS-DOS operating system wasn’t particularly secure – few home computer operating systems were back then – so viruses could spread quickly, and many did. Some of the viruses focused more on actually w...

via Unsung November 11, 2026

The villa of Ormen

As a child, I was never a fan of any actor or singer. David Bowie is the closest thing to a “music idol” I’ve ever had. I never had a poster of him on my wall, or a T-shirt with his face on it, but he was a constant presence in my playlists, to the point w...

via Personal Site of Andrei N. Ciobanu November 11, 2026

Candidate Statement for the 2026 W3C TAG Election

Group photo of the W3C TAG in July 2022 with me to the left of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web and TAG chair emeritus). Photo credit: Dan Appelquist I had the great honor of being elected to the TAG by the W3C membership in 2020 and again in 2022,...

via Lea Verou’s blog November 11, 2026

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