Lev Lazinskiy

Integrating Openring into this Blog

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.