Volt_blogSite_backend

A lightweight backend proxy for serving my Substack RSS feed to my personal website.

Overview

I built this so I could query my Substack RSS feed and display blog posts on my personal site. I ran into CORS issues calling the RSS feed directly from the browser, so I needed a backend to route the API call through. This service is hosted on Render under as free-tier service, which means it will sleep when idle. The first request after a period of inactivity has a ~45 second cold start. One future improvement is to redesign or migrate this service to avoid that latency.

Tech Stack

• Python
• Flask
• Deployed via Render

Running it locally

1. Clone the repo
2. Create & activate a virtual environment (Optional)
3. Install dependencies pip install -r requirements.txt
4. Run the app entrypoint
5. Hit the endpoint via a request from the browser or curl/Postman

API endpoint overview

GET /api/substack - returns the proxied RSS feed for the substack url given in the app.py variable url

Deployment info

• This service is hosted on Render
• The render.yaml file provides a basic python runtime that installs dependencies and starts the app app.py

Future improvements

• Get rid of any downtime for the backend service and ensure it responds immediately whenever someone views the blog page of my site.
• Add more error handling and testing around any API calls.
• Add additional endpoints for other features.