This is Planet Cloudflare

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.

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 to 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.

Why doesn't this blog allow comments?

Should your blog have comments? That's one of the perennial questions that every blogger faces. Are comments a way to bring in vital feedback from the-people-formerly-known-as-the-audience or are they merely a mechanism for enabling strangers to spew hatred and bile on a page with your name attached?

Historically my position has been "comments are bad, run away." My reasons included:

• I really don't want to deal with spam. The only thing worse than having spam on your blog is using moderation systems that mean I have to read every spammy comment in order for you to get a better experience. I like you but I don't like you that much.
• BuzzGoogle+ is a better conversational network than my blog. Every post on my blog ends up on my blog's Google+ Page as well.
• BuzzGoogle+ also has the advantage that there can be multiple conversations by completely disjoint communities about the same blog post.
• BuzzGoogle+ emphasises Real Names and Serial Identity. This means I can look at people's activity stream to see what they've been posting about, commenting upon and sharing. Of course, just because you're using your real name doesn't mean that you won't say or do things that I find objectionable but which your community finds laudable.
• I agree strongly with Derek Powazek that your right to free speech stops where my territory starts.
• I think it's a terrible idea to put everybody who has an opinion on a topic into the same room. That invariably leads to name-calling because they have so little common ground or shared vocabulary. For every person who understands the topic and wants to discuss nuances there'll be 10 people who would like a clearer explanation of the fundamentals. 

All of the above are good and sound reasons for disabling comments. So why have I just enabled comments on this blog?

The main reason is that I have new technology and I want to see if, just this once, technology can solve a social problem. The secondary reason is that I'm interested in aggregating the conversations around my blog posts. My hope is that this aggregation will help me discover people who are saying interesting and insightful things about what I've written.

I could be wrong but I live in hope.