# ★ miniflux: add country flags to all feeds 🌐

> Source: <https://perrotta.dev/2026/08/miniflux-add-country-flags-to-all-feeds/>
> Published: 2026-08-27 23:20:26+00:00

♠ **Problem statement**: given my miniflux server with hundreds of RSS feed
subscriptions, add emoji country flags to each feed title, representing their
country of origin and/or the country they’re associated with 1.

For example:

Some feeds may be identified with multiple flags. The distinction is purposely loose.

I started to do this tagging process manually, throughout several weeks, until I exhausted the ones I knew about.

The next natural step, in 2026, is to resort to Gen AI to finish the heavy lifting, now that the initial pattern has been established.

With my [OpenAI Codex](https://perrotta.dev/2026/08/chatgpt-/-openai-/-codex-plan-usage/) subscription and pi, I prompted away:

User: List all prompts I ran in this session, bulleted list:

Thinking: Listing all user prompt messages

- “Are you able to connect to my miniflux database in knol? (ssh knol) Creds are in /etc/miniflux.conf in knol.”
- “Note that Alpine Linux uses doas, not sudo.”
- “Are you able to find my list of subscriptions / feeds? There should be 687 of these.”
- “Observe that some feed titles have flags in them.”
- “I want to add a flag for the origin of each blog. Source a few feeds lacking flags and suggest which flags to add.”
- “LGTM.”
- “Source 10–15 more blogs.”
- “LGTM.”
- “Write a blog post about this work using /bloggify.”
- “List all prompts I ran in this session, bulleted list.”

Here are a few interesting bits produced by the agent. Note that I run the
coding harness (`pi`

) from my laptop, not from my server. As such, all commands
that interact with the server do so via `ssh`

. This is good enough for my
purposes.

Count all feeds:

```
% ssh knol 'doas sh -c '\''. /etc/miniflux.conf; psql "$DATABASE_URL" -X -Atqc "SELECT count(*) FROM feeds"'\'''
687
```

Some titles already followed the convention:

```
780|37signals jobs 🇩🇰🇺🇸
818|A cup of coffee by Quentin JOLY 🇫🇷
1366|AI Engineer Guide 🇮🇳
562|Adam Gordon Bell: Cascade Of Insights 🇨🇦
916|Adam Johnson 🇬🇧
```

A pair of Unicode regional indicators forms a flag. Export the titles and count those pairs:

```
% ssh knol 'doas sh -c '\''. /etc/miniflux.conf; psql "$DATABASE_URL" -X -q -c \
  "COPY (SELECT id, title FROM feeds ORDER BY title) TO STDOUT WITH CSV"'\''' | \
  python3 -c 'import csv,sys,re; rows=list(csv.reader(sys.stdin)); p=re.compile(r"[\U0001F1E6-\U0001F1FF]{2}"); found=[(i,t,p.findall(t)) for i,t in rows if p.search(t)]; print(f"feeds_with_flags={len(found)} flags={sum(len(x[2]) for x in found)}")'
feeds_with_flags=148 flags=158
```

I did not infer origin from a name, domain, language, or current residence. Each
addition needed an explicit source. For example, [Jeremy
Keith](https://adactio.com/about/) says “I’m from Ireland originally”, [Andre
Garzia](https://andregarzia.com/about.html) says he is originally from Brazil,
and [Christian Rebischke](https://shibumi.dev/about/) describes himself as being
from Germany.

The title itself is the metadata. Exact old-title guards made each update idempotent and prevented an accidental edit to a renamed feed:

```
BEGIN;
UPDATE feeds
SET title = 'Christian Rebischke: shibumi 🇩🇪'
WHERE id = 207 AND title = 'Christian Rebischke: shibumi';
UPDATE feeds
SET title = 'Adactio: Journal by Jeremy Keith 🇮🇪'
WHERE id = 1106 AND title = 'Adactio: Journal by Jeremy Keith';
UPDATE feeds
SET title = 'Adactio: Articles by Jeremy Keith 🇮🇪'
WHERE id = 1107 AND title = 'Adactio: Articles by Jeremy Keith';
UPDATE feeds
SET title = 'Andre Alves Garzia 🇧🇷'
WHERE id = 1481 AND title = 'Andre Alves Garzia';
COMMIT;
BEGIN
UPDATE 1
UPDATE 1
UPDATE 1
UPDATE 1
COMMIT
```

A second sourced batch added 12 more titles. Compound origins stay compound:

```
430|Burak Karakan: ps 🇩🇪🇹🇷
1022|Amjad Masad 🇯🇴🇺🇸
1076|Christopher Olah 🇨🇦
1100|Cognitive Medium by Michael Nielsen 🇦🇺🇺🇸
1174|Andrej Karpathy 🇸🇰🇨🇦
1489|Jeff Geerling 🇺🇸
```

The same audit now reports:

```
total=687
feeds_with_flags=164
flags=178
without_flags=523
```

Only 523 to go.

This is a practical excuse to tokenmaxx, eh?!

Web searches are done with [pi-web-search](https://github.com/thiagowfx/.dotfiles/tree/e6d1452118ad2b2c317545571fd0923519bf7a41/pi/.pi/agent/local/web-search). ∎

Why? Purely as a matter of context, and for an extra dose of serendipity
via diversity. For example, it’s often exciting to me to read posts from
other Canadians, for no particular reason. [↩︎](https://perrotta.dev/2026/08/miniflux-add-country-flags-to-all-feeds/#fnref:1)

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