I built something pretty damn cool. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time. It's called Links. It brings together two of my favorite things: blogs and Bitcoin.
What is Links?
Links is a Bitcoin content aggregator. The goal of Links is to deliver you the absolute best commentary on Bitcoin. Our sources are carefully curated and constantly updated as we uncover more signal. See an interesting article?Click it, sonate some sats to the paywall via Lightning, and read your content. The goal of Links is to deliver you the absolute best commentary on Bitcoin. Our sources are carefully curated and constantly updated as we uncover more signal.
RSS and Lightning Network
This project is the product of RSS and Lightning Network. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a protocol that enables the distribution of blogs and pods. If you’re subscribed to a pod in iTunes or Spotify, RSS is the magic that pulls in new episodes. This also applies to blogs. Some people read blogs with “feed readers”. A popular one is @feedly. From almost any blog or webpage, you can grab the url and plug it in a feed reader and it will use the blogs RSS to pull in new articles. This allows you to have the new articles delivered to you, rather than going to each web page. The Links project takes RSS from carefully curated Bitcoin blogs and wraps them in Bitcoin Lightning Network. All the blog posts that are pulled into Links are paywalled with Lightning Network invoices.
The million satoshi question is this… Will people pay to read curated content?
I’ll be trying to figure that out.
Enabling Technologies for Links
- GitHub Pages is the hosting and git powerhouse
- Planet Pluto is the static page builder that does the RSS magic. Shout out to Gerald Bauer for this amazing code.
- Lightning Feed Wrapper by LNPay.co is the all star that takes the RSS feeds and wraps them in LIghtning Network. Major props to Tim Kijewski on being reckless enough to build this!