Create a feed of every Alaveteli's blog content

[garethrees]

Many Alaveteli installs have a BLOG_FEED configured, but that's only rendered on the individual Alaveteli.

A huge benefit to running Alaveteli is being part of a network of ATI activists, so it would be great to have a better understanding of what's going on in the wider network.

Creating an aggregated feed

We already maintain a list of known Alaveteli deployments.

While it's a bit of extra manual work, we could add a blog_feed key/value pair for each Alaveteli.

Then, create a script to fetch each feed URL and combine all the posts into a single feed, and run this script periodically (nightly is probably frequent enough) via GitHub actions. Generating it as a static file would be fine.

The combined feed would only need a few values:

• Post title
• Post URL
• Alaveteli sitename (maybe)
• Country

Enhancement – translations

Many of the sites will write in their native language. It would be great to use a free translation API to translate the post title into English, as that's the language we use for the admin UI of Alaveteli. Users can then use built-in browser translation tools if they click through to the post.

Public Presentation

The key part of this is getting the aggregated feed available as an RSS endpoint. It would also be nice to display it publicly. It might be possible to programmatically import them into the TICTeC COP Page. If that's not easy, we could hack together a quick page on alaveteli.org.