Saturday, March 2, 2019

How I migrated my homepage away from Google+

Previously, I was using the Google+ API to fetch my posts as JSON and render them on my homepage using a custom template. Now that Google+ is going away, I had to find another solution.

Available sources

So I investigated which sources have good APIs that you can use:

  • Facebook: Unfortunately no API to access posts of a profile. You can only access posts of a page.
  • Instagram: Public posts are available, and you can convert them to RSS using e.g. Queryfeed.
  • Twitter: Can also be exported to RSS via Queryfeed and others.
  • Blogger: Exports RSS and Atom, obviously.

Combining sources

I found RSS Mix to be a very easy way to combine multiple feeds. I'm now combining my Instagram and Blogger feed.

Rendering to HTML

On my website I now download that combined feed using feedparser and render the feed using a Jinja2 template. Et voilĂ , goodbye Google+!

This is probably better anyway, as I stopped posting to G+ a long time ago and my stream got stale. So my homepage should look a little more up to date now!

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