Automating my links list

How I automated my Instapaper “liked” articles into a clean, sorted JSON feed for my 11ty site — with date normalization, HTML stripping, and deduplication, all running daily via GitHub Actions.

I keep a running list of articles I’ve read and liked — partly for reference, partly for sharing.

For years, I used Instapaper for saving articles, and IFTTT to log my “liked” ones into Airtable.

But getting them onto juanfernandes.uk/links meant manually updating a JSON file. Not exactly friction-free.

So I automated the whole thing. And over time, I’ve refined it to handle dates properly , avoid duplicates , and keep the list sorted — no manual edits, no mess.

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✅ The stack

• Instapaper RSS feed – for fetching my recently liked articles
• A custom Node.js script – to grab new links, clean them, and update JSON
• GitHub Actions – to run the script and rebuild my site daily
• 11ty – to display the links with pagination

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Step 1: The Instapaper RSS feed

Instapaper gives you a feed of your “liked” articles:

https://www.instapaper.com/starred/rss/[user_id]/[token]

It only shows your 10 most recent liked items, so the key is appending new ones without losing older ones.

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Step 2: Writing to links.raw.json

Instead of saving directly to links.json (which Eleventy uses for pagination), the script now writes to:

src/_data/links.raw.json

This file is my raw archive of everything I’ve ever liked on Instapaper.

Why? Because Eleventy treats .js and .json files in _data differently — having a .js file for links means I can read, sort, and clean the raw JSON every time before it’s passed to the templates.

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Step 3: The append script (appendToJSON.js)

The script does the heavy lifting:

• Fetches the Instapaper RSS feed
• Normalizes dates → full ISO 8601 format (2025-07-28T18:53:22.000Z instead of 2025-07-28)
• Strips HTML from titles , so tags like <details> don’t show in headings
• Keeps HTML in content if I want formatted excerpts
• De-dupes by URL (latest version wins)
• Sorts newest → oldest before saving

Here’s a trimmed example of the mapping logic:

function stripHtml(str) { return str ? str.replace(/<\/?[^>]+(>|$)/g, "") : "";}function toIso(val) { if (!val) return new Date().toISOString(); const t = Date.parse(val); return Number.isNaN(t) ? new Date().toISOString() : new Date(t).toISOString();}// Map RSS itemsconst mapped = feed.items.map(item => ({ title: stripHtml(item.title || ""), url: item.link?.trim(), content: item["content:encoded"] || item.content || "", date: toIso(item.pubDate || item.isoDate)}));

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Step 4: Sorting in Eleventy

Now that links.raw.json is clean, src/_data/links.js becomes the single source of truth for Eleventy:

const fs = require("fs");const path = require("path");module.exports = () => { const raw = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync(path.join(__dirname, "links.raw.json"), "utf8")); return raw.sort((a, b) => Date.parse(b.date) - Date.parse(a.date));};

This guarantees that pagination always starts with the most recent items.

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Step 5: Automation with GitHub Actions

My GitHub Action now:

1. Runs appendToJSON.js to update links.raw.json
2. Builds the site with Eleventy
3. Deploys the updated site

That means every day my “Read Articles” page refreshes automatically, and it’s always:

• Up to date
• Properly sorted
• Free from HTML junk in titles
• Duplicate-free

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The result

juanfernandes.uk/links is now fully automated and clean.

No more manual edits, no more date format headaches, and no need to check if something’s already been added.

It just works. Every day.

If you want to set up something similar, the full append script is on my GitHub — or drop me a message and I can help adapt it for your setup.