A self-hosted publishing and reading stack: 8 notes on Pelican, RSS, Glance, SearXNG and Cloudflare Tunnel
Description and use
A fully self‑hosted publishing and reading stack using Pelican, RSS.Beauty, listmonk, Glance, SearXNG, and Cloudflare Tunnel, eliminating paid services.
Problem
How to run a personal publishing and reading setup cheaply without relying on paid platforms?
Outcome
The stack enables end‑to‑end self‑hosting of publishing, feed presentation, newsletters, dashboards, search, and remote access without paid services.
Workflow
- Write content in Markdown with Pelican
- Generate static site and Atom/RSS feeds
- Deploy RSS.Beauty to transform feeds into readable pages
- Set up listmonk to convert RSS to email digests
- Configure Glance dashboard to aggregate feeds and other widgets
- Deploy SearXNG for privacy‑preserving metasearch
- Expose services via Cloudflare Tunnel for secure remote access
Evidence
Pelican. A Python static site generator that still earns its place in 2026.
RSS.Beauty. Raw XML feeds look broken to anyone who clicks them. This project uses XSLT to turn RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 into a readable, mobile-friendly page with one-click subscribe buttons.
listmonk. Some readers will never install a feed reader, so email is the fallback. The weekly digest I saved walks through standing up listmonk as a self-hosted newsletter and converting between RSS and email in both directions.
Glance is a self-hosted dashboard configured in YAML, with widgets for RSS, Hacker News, subreddits, weather, markets and Docker container status, and it ships as a single binary under 20 MB.
SearXNG. A metasearch engine that aggregates results from many search services without tracking or profiling you.
Cloudflare Tunnel. Running services at home is easy; reaching them from outside without opening ports is the hard part. A Tunnel runs cloudflared on your local box, gives each service a subdomain with automatic HTTPS, and can put an email or IP allowlist in front of it.
- Record date: 2026-10-24T03:11:20.660Z