Obscurity.Wiki

🔬 Are.na feed generator

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Today (Feb 29, 2024), if you visit fergarram.online you'll see a minimal feed/blog looking site. That was made with an are.na feed generator that doesn't have it's own repo but the code is currently here.

Here is the README:

Are.na blog maker thing

So this tool kinda just appeared on my mind one night as a vision.

As I chased this vision I realized that god wanted me to blog like when I was 13.

And this is it. It's a simple static site genertor.

I like to see it as an are.na blog maker.

Or a feed/timeline/log/journal that works based on are.na channels and blocks.

See it as you will.

Just deploy it here:

Deploy with Vercel

Env Variables

DANGER_ARENA_TOKEN

You can get your auth token here.

SITE_CHANNEL_ID

Simple. It's the last part of your channel url. In my case I'm using are.na/fergarram/fergarram-online so I would use fergarram-online.

IS_VERCEL

Just set it to true.

THEME

Choose a theme. There are 5 options currently avaialbe:

  • default like fergarram.online (if empty it's set to default)
  • emo-kitty
  • olive
  • dark-olive
  • not-hacker-news

SHOW_THEME_TOGGLE

Default is true. Once you decide on a theme, you can turn it off.

You can change all these variables after deployment by going to the vercel enviroment settings

Optional UTC_OFFSET

There is an optional little clock on the top right of the page. To get the UTC offset of your city you can use this tool. Find the part that says Current Offset: UTC/GMT -6 hours. The offset is -6 in my case for Mexico City.

Local Development

Copy the .env.sample into .env and replace with your values as shown above.

DANGER_ARENA_TOKEN=XXXXXXX
IS_VERCEL=false
SITE_CHANNEL_ID=unique-slug-or-id-number
UTC_OFFSET=-6

Note that IS_VERCEL is set to false here.

You'll need the latest LTS version of node. Specifically because I use fetch.

If you don't have node installed you can download it here.

If you have nvm installed than you can use that instead (nvm install --lts).

Once installed just run:

node server.js

Running that will generate html files in the public directory.

Just open the public/index.html with your browser.

And that's it.

There aren't really any dependencies, it's just a node script that you run to build the html pages.

If you don't want to be running node server.js everytime you can use nodemon:

npm i -g nodemon
nodemon server.js

Hopefully this is simple enough.