Planet Cloudflare is an old-fashioned RSS/Atom aggregator for blogs from Cloudflare employees and the wider Cloudflare community. It's motivated both by my love of Python and my nostalgia for the good old days of blogging.
But more importantly it's a long term demo of Python Workers. They are (as of March 2026) still in beta but this demonstrates their ability to integrate with the rest of the Cloudflare platform in a production environment. I'm also hoping this exemplifies how Python Workers can bring the advantages of the Cloudflare platform (low cost, high scalability and a wide variety of interesting services) to Python developers.
The implementation itself is relatively simple. It's an instance of Planet CF which is an open source RSS/Atom aggregator that supports all the usual features (responsible web fetching, liberal feedparsing via Feedparser and themes) people expect from Planet-style aggregators. It uses Cloudflare's Cron Trigger service to trigger the fetching of all the feeds once an hour. Since the number of feeds is potentially very large I enqueue each feed separately so that I have a separate worker to fetch each one. This has the benefit that I never have to worry about how many feeds are in the system.
Like many projects that use Cloudflare the architecture is relatively simple. This simplicity supports a departure from the usual architecture of Planet-style aggregators. I store every blog post in D1 then provide both full-text search (using SQLite's BM25 algorithm) and vector search (based on Cloudflare's Vectorize). I then combine and re-rank the results so that you get a search engine that provides the results you expect when you type literal strings as well as handling synonyms. I'll be writing more in the future about how we can combine indices to cheaply provide sophisticated search features.
Over time I expect to see this instance grow as I add more bloggers. Ideally this might even encourage more people to come back to blogging.
