May 8th, 2024

I needed to setup a blog to try a few RSS to ActivityPub bridges. This is the result.

I've been evaluating writing blog posts for some time now. Never decided to start because I was not sure I would dedicate it the needed time or effort. But finally I decided that I wanted to write a few things about projects I create, like pixelated fonts, or accesible pallettes, and started designing and organizing the code of my web page to allow for article publication.

Ideally, I wanted to setup some kind of blog generating system, maybe something I could deploy to my hosting site or maybe some kind of static site generator. But everything I found was cumbersome, overly complicated, or was three frameworks in a trenchcoat, and allowed for difficult personalization (I create my how CSS, and I'm not too keen on CSS frameworks, no matter how useful those are).

I'm also a fan of the fediverse, and tried to see if there was some simple blogging platform (ideally, something I could simply upload to my server via ftp and run) that supported ActivityPub and RSS. And since there seems to be a few efforts in that direction, no actual software exists that one can simply deploy to offer ActivityPub integration to a simple, one user blog.

So, in the end, I decided the best I could do is generate everything by hand (yes, even the RSS feed) and try one of those ActivityPub bridges, like RSS Parrot or Bridgy Fed. This post was created solely to have something present in my website to test those bridges, so, that's that...

If you want to follow this blog in the future from a Fediverse account, just follow @damianvila.com@rss-parrot.net or @damianvila.com@web.brid.gy, and you'll see a post on your feed every time I post a new article. See you around. Cheers!