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

Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast

I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines. It's available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Here …

via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries April 2, 2026

Flood Fill vs the Magic Circle

Musings from Robin Sloan: Most olive oil production at medium-or-greater scale depends on machines of this kind [over-the-row olive harvester]; they trundle over trees planted in long rows, almost like continuous hedges, and collect the fruit with vibratin…

via Information Overload April 2, 2026

The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity

Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997: He quips: this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»…

via Jim Nielsen’s Blog April 2, 2026

Generated by openring