DEV Community: Usama Ejaz

I built a blogging platform on Cloudflare Workers. Here's how it went.

Usama Ejaz — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 13:39:02 +0000

I wanted to start a personal blog.

WordPress felt like overkill. Ghost Cloud also felt too much, and I need a server for self-hosting. Medium doesn't let you own your content. Substack is for newsletters, not blogs.

In the past, I had used static site generators. Particularly, I had a Jekyll blog. I just didn't want to go through the hassle of managing files every time I wanted to write a new post.

So I built my own.

The stack

JustBlogged runs entirely on Cloudflare Workers. No traditional servers.

Here's why:

Edge deployment = content served from 300+ locations worldwide
Cold starts under 5ms
No scaling headaches
Cost is almost nothing at low traffic

For storage, I'm using Cloudflare KV for metadata and caching and R2 for assets.

Supporting custom domains and SSL was done by setting up one reverse proxy server, as Cloudflare for SaaS custom domains felt limited (you have to be an enterprise to use Apex domains).

What actually took time

The blogging part was easy. The hard parts:

Custom domains — DNS propagation, SSL certificate provisioning, handling edge cases where someone's domain has weird CNAME setups
Image optimization — Auto-resizing, WebP conversion, lazy loading. Users upload 5MB images and expect fast pages
Theme system — Making themes customizable without giving users enough rope to hang themselves
Ensuring a built-in caching (and purge) mechanism so each page load is always less than 500ms.
Rich-text editor can take time if you don't like the default setups

Numbers

Average page load: under 500ms mostly for cold hits and around 300ms for hot hits
Setup time for new blog: ~2 minutes - just sign up, and start writing
Infra cost per blog: basically zero until you hit serious traffic

Try it

JustBlogged is live at justblogged.com. Free tier is actually free — no trial, no credit card.

If you're a dev who wants a simple blog without the WordPress tax, give it a shot. Would love feedback on what's missing.

How To Auto Post From RSS Feeds To Your Social Media

Usama Ejaz — Sun, 12 Jan 2020 12:31:00 +0000

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. It allows users and applications to access updates to a website in a standardized, computer-readable format.

Almost all blogs offer their updates in the form of an RSS feed so their users can subscribe to the RSS feed and be updated whenever a new page or post is published. There are a lot of RSS-reader applications that also do the same: they inform the user about the website updates by subscribing to the RSS feeds.

Posting updates to your social media about new website content is also very important. The old school way to do this was manually posting the link to the new page, content, or blog post to your social media. It becomes extremely hard and time-consuming when you want to share content to your social media from multiple RSS feeds. The RSS feeds may or may not belong to your own blogs or websites.

Here is how you can set up SocialBu to auto post from RSS feeds to your social media accounts. We will use SocialBu Automation to set this up. This is useful if you want to auto-post from RSS to social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

First of all, create a new Automation from here. You can name it however you like.

Select the event "RSS feed has new item" as shown in the image below.

Event: RSS feed has a new item

After selecting the event, you will see its inputs. Enter the RSS feed URL. We will use https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/feed/ as an example.

Entering the RSS feed URL

Now, you need to specify the actions. For publishing posts, you have two options. We will use the first one in this example.

Publish a Post (publishes the post right away)
Add Post to Queue (saves the post to a custom Queue which you can create)

Multiple actions are available

You will also need to select the social media accounts the post should be published to.

The post contents need to be set and you can add any text you want to be published. To use the RSS content in the post text, we can use dynamic data placeholders. These placeholder tags will be replaced with actual content from RSS feed.

Data Placeholders

To use the title and link in the post text, we can use the data placeholders {{ title }} and {{ link }}.

The post content looks like the following in our example.

{{ title }} {{ link }}

Post Content (for RSS feed item)

That's all. Save this Automation and SocialBu will post content from the RSS feed whenever there is a new update/blog post/item.

Here are some things to remember while setting this up.

For posting content efficiently, use a custom Queue and save the post to Queue instead of publishing it right away.
For control over what gets published, you can also set conditions for the actions here. This is useful if you want to only post selective updates from the RSS feed (such as from a specific category, a specific author and so on).
It's also possible to publish image posts if you select "Attach media if available". This can also work for Instagram. The image is extracted from the RSS item or the link.

Monitoring Reddit Communities For Your Keywords

Usama Ejaz — Sat, 04 Jan 2020 21:47:09 +0000

We really like Reddit - you have a community for almost every interest. It is very helpful to connect with people of similar interests. You ask questions, get answers, memes, puns, karma, and a lot. It is also possible to get lost in Reddit sometimes (they even have a subreddit for it: r/lostredditors).

When you are participating in multiple communities and want to be aware of new posts that are coming, it might become hard and time-consuming to do that. At best, you will be able to see the posts which Reddit decides to show you when you log in to Reddit but that means you are very likely to miss a lot of posts.

Suppose you want to monitor a subreddit for mention of your name or your company, what will you do? Keep checking every new post? What if there are a good number of subreddits you want to track? It will soon become unmanageable and a lot of your time will fade away doing that. However, there is a solution.

The solution is that you get notified about every new post which might be of any interest to you (mentions your name or a keyword you are interested in). While there are some dedicated tools for this job (you can probably see some by searching for reddit keyword alerter, reddit keyword monitoring or similar queries), you can monitor subreddits for your keywords and alert yourself if a post is published containing the keywords that you are interested in. Originally, the functionality offered by SocialBu was never built keeping this scenario in mind but it can work perfectly.

You just have to create a new SocialBu Automation, select the "RSS feed has new item" event and use any subreddit's RSS feed as shown in the image below.

You will need to use the RSS feed URL of a subreddit for this to work. Every subreddit has an RSS feed on reddit (more about it here). Finding the RSS feed URL is easy. For example, RSS feed URL for r/GrowthHacking will be:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GrowthHacking/.rss

Next, you need to add actions to perform when there is a new item (or post) on this RSS feed (or subreddit). You can simply notify yourself or someone via email.

Now comes the good part; you don't want to get alerted for every new post in that subreddit. No issues, we can just add some "conditions" to make sure we only get alerted when a post containing our keywords appear. You can filter based on multiple keywords (or conditions).

Here is how it looks in my case (image below).

In this case, it will only send me an email if a new post contains "organic" or "book" in the post title. I have also used data placeholders in the email body which correspond to the new post's title and link.

Now you know how easy it is to monitor your favorite subreddits for posts that you want to participate in. Forget about missing reddit posts now.