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Navin Varma
Navin Varma

Posted on • Originally published at nvarma.com

Building Radar: A Google Sheets Hack for My Link Feed

#webdev #astro #buildinginpublic #googlesheets

Originally published on nvarma.com

I'd just finished setting up a newsletter with Kit and tried webmentions (p.s. it was a waste of time, no backlinks showed up). I was thinking about what would actually make this site more useful for anyone who visits. I read a LOT of articles, blogs, hackernews, reddit, random LinkedIn/X/Substack posts, emerging tech news and so much more. I had this idea of a curated "what I'm reading" page. A place where I could share links and have them show up on my website automatically.

The requirement was simple: click "Share" on an article on my phone, add a quick comment, and have it show up on my site. The name "Radar" came from a list of options (Signal, Bookmarks, Feed, Picks) but "on my radar" felt right for what this is.

First attempt: social platforms

My first thought was a public WhatsApp channel. Share a link from my phone, have my site pull it in. Deflect the scale problem to a third-party. Except WhatsApp has no public API for channels. So that was a no-go.

I looked at alternatives. Telegram had a great bot API, Raindrop.io was clean but another tool to maintain. I tried a couple of social platforms that had open public APIs. No API keys, no OAuth, no rate limit tokens. Just a URL you can hit and get a user's posts back as JSON.

I built the first version of Radar using one of these (hint: Bluesky). It worked great: fetch my posts at build time, render them as a feed, done. No JavaScript on the client, no live API calls. Just a fetch during the Astro build and some HTML.

Why I moved on

Then I paused and thought about what I was actually doing. I was embedding a social platform into my personal website, not just linking to it, but making it a core data source. Whatever platform I picked, I'd be associating my site with it. And every social platform today carries baggage.

I don't want my website to signal anything political. I'm not interested in debates, I'm not picking sides. This site is about what I'm building, reading, and thinking about — not which corner of the internet I post from. It also made me realize I need to be careful about what I share on my public website, so there's that.

When I looked into it, every social platform had something: a reputation, a lean, a controversy. It's not that any of these platforms are bad. Millions of people use them and that's their choice. But I want my site to be a neutral space. So I started evaluating alternatives:

  • Mastodon, Telegram, Micro.blog — All had usable APIs, but still social platforms. Micro.blog was also $5/month.
  • Supabase — Free Postgres with a REST API. Overkill for a list of links.
  • GitHub repo/issues — Free and reliable, but the workflow from phone is clunky.
  • Notion database — Public API, but rate-limited and requires an integration token.
  • Raindrop.io — Beautiful bookmarking tool, but another account to manage.
  • Cloudflare Workers KV — Free tier, but I'd need to build a small API to write to it.

Everything was either too heavy, too dependent on a startup's goodwill, or carried associations I wanted to avoid.

The Google Sheets hack

I did some hypothesizing with my friend Claude Code, and the simplest option won. Google Forms + Google Sheets.

  1. Google Form with two fields: url (short answer) and comment (paragraph)
  2. Form responses automatically populate a Google Sheet
  3. Publish the sheet to the web as CSV, which gives you a public URL that returns the sheet data as plain CSV, no API key needed
  4. Astro fetches the CSV at build time, parses it, and renders the feed

Google Sheets

The CSV URL looks like this:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/.../pub?gid=...&single=true&output=csv
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No auth tokens. No API keys. No rate limits. No startup that might pivot or shut down. It's Google Sheets — a plain, boring data store. Nobody looks at a website and infers anything about the person behind it because they used a spreadsheet. It's invisible infrastructure, like using Gmail or Google Drive. That's exactly what I wanted.

The workflow from my phone: I added a shortcut to the Google Form on my home screen. I see an article I like, tap the shortcut, paste the URL, add a quick comment, submit. On my Mac, I created a shortcut app called "My Radar" and pinned it to the dock. After I submit my link and comment, the next site rebuild that is currently 3 times a day picks it up.

My Radar showing up as a Mac app in Spotlight

For each URL, I also fetch Open Graph metadata at build time so each link shows a rich preview card with the article's actual headline and image, not just a raw URL.

The Radar page is live. Go check it out if you want to see what's on my radar. Someday I'd love to build a "Navin's List" that aggregates everything I share across LinkedIn, X, and this blog into one feed. For now, Google Forms isn't glamorous, but it's free, it's reliable, it works from my phone, and nobody's going to read subtext into a spreadsheet.

This post was originally published on nvarma.com. Follow me there for more on software architecture, engineering leadership, and the craft of building things that last.

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