Welcome

This is a simple, Flask-based API that proxies TinyLetter archives into a Atom feed, suitable for use with feed readers. The inspiration from this came from a tweet from Lou Huang.

Configuration

None required. The proxy API will scrape author, title and TinyLetter descriptions and populate accordingly.

Use

The API exposes endpoints for summaries feeds and full record feeds. Both endpoints take a "slugged" feed name.

For example, if you want to generate a feed for https://tinyletter.com/data-is-plural/archive, you would use data-is-plural as the feed_name parameter.

You can also pass an optional count of results to fetch. TinyLetter returns a minimum of 10 results when displaying the archive, so any count less than 10 will have no effect.

Summary Feed

The summary endpoint will return a feed with a short description of each letter's content.

• URL

  /feeds/summary/:feed_name/:count/ /feeds/summary/:feed_name/

• Method:

  GET

• URL Params

  Required

  feed_name=[string]

  Optional

  count=[int]

• Success Response:

  • Code: 200
    Content: ATOM XML Document

Full Feed

The full end point will return the full content of the letter itself.

• URL

  /feeds/full/:feed_name/:count/ /feeds/full/:feed_name/

• Method:

  GET

• URL Params

  Required

  feed_name=[string]

  Optional

  count=[int]

• Success Response:

  • Code: 200
    Content: ATOM XML Document

Deployment

As this is a standard, WSGI-based Flask app, it can be packaged and deployed anywhere that can host and serve Python web applications. That said, this is an ideal application for deploying to AWS Lambda using zappa

Zappa configuration and deployment is fairly straightforward.

Configuring a IAM role for the application can be a bit tricky. The Zappa documentation is slightly vague on how to best grant permissions, partially due to the security implications. That said, this is an example policy that will allow you to deploy this application with Zappa.

The steps required before running Zappa, include setting up an IAM Role, downloading and installing the AWS credentials in a local credentials file (likely located at ~/.aws/credentials), and then attaching a policy to that role.

The policy linked to above requires a few edits. You'll need to fill in the name of the s3 bucket that you intend to use. This bucket should also be specified in the zappa_settings.json file that will be generated after running zappa init. You'll also need to fill in your AWS account id.