Planets are a fairly common method to aggregate blogs.
They are especially pervasive in the
FOSS
world, with planets for
Debian,
Gnome,
KDE,
and many others.
I find planets as a useful resource for a community to give a single place for
the communication and to check for updates. The usual method of communication
in blogs is a reply in a post, the planet makes the replies come in the same
page for the reader with little context loss.
For this reason I'm also fond of setting up planets myself for those
communities that lack them, and so I setup planets for
FOSS-IL for Israeli blogs about FOSS
issues (mostly in Hebrew),
Planet (former) Advogato for former
Advogato bloggers and the latest one is
Planet MicroISV for MicroISVs.
I was
asked
to provide some (tutorial help something) on setting up a planet, and this
post is the answer to that request.
The PlanetPlanet program is a very common RSS feed aggregator, it works with
most feeds and is fairly tolerant to non-standard-conforming feeds. It is also
relatively low maintenance, which is why I chose it for my aggregators.
Prerequisites
The first thing you'll need is to make sure you have Python 2.2 or better
installed. If you're on a sane OS, you can just do
apt-get install
python2.3 otherwise you are left to fend for yourself. For the Windows
folks there is
ActivePython.
Another would be prerequisite is
GNU Arch or
GNU Arch or
Bazaar, two implementations for the
Distributed
Revision Control algorithm which was pioneered in GNU Arch. Bazaar would
be more user friendly, but both
IMNSHO are horrendous
user-interface wise. Which is why I provide a
snapshot
of the latest revision for your benefit.
Install
Installation would be fairly simple, just unpack the
tar.gz
and it's installed, nothing else needs to be done, except configuring it.
The snapshot I provided is just a raw dump of the arch repository, it is
useful as is since you can update the installation as needed by just updating
and merging with Arch/Bazaar. This will not be covered here. Too much
of a trouble for now, and the PlanetPlanet development is at the pace of a
snail carrying an elephant, don't expect updates in the near future.
Configure
I assume you have in mind the list of blogs you want to put on the planet. It
need not be comprehensive, a few blogs to start would be good enough. It's
trivial to add more as you go.
In the planet directory you should copy the
examples directory to a new one,
say
myplanet, copy the
output directory to
myplanet-output and edit the
myplanet/config.ini file.
At the minimum you should change the following variables:
- name – The name of your planet
- link – The URL where you planet will live, used inside the feeds
the planet exports
- owner_name and owner_email – obvious isn't it?
- output_dir – that should be
myplanet-output according to
the instructions above
- template_files – change and replace
examples with
myplanet
The next stage would be to replace the existing blog listed in the config.ini
file with your own list. The example is there and is trivial to follow, the
entry for a blog looks like:
[http://baruch.ev-en.org/blog/index.rss2]
name = Baruch Even
Where the feed URL is in square brackets and the name of the blog is the name.
There are various games that are possible with the templates but we'll ignore
them for now and let you learn them from the examples provided by the authors.
The next stage is just to run the planet on the new files, we will use the
defaults for the rest.
python planet.py myplanet/config.ini
The planet will work for a while, churn out various uninteresting messages and
generate the files we asked it for in the
myplanet-output. You
can now inspect the files in the output directory, load them in a browser and
enjoy.
Tweaks
So you haven't left yet? Want some more info?
One obvious question is now that we have the files, how do we serve them to
the world so everyone can enjoy our creation? First, you should ask yourself
if the world really cares... you do, ah?! OK. If the world cares enough it
will find a way to show you how to do it. Since it depends on your OS, web
server and various configurations, I can't help you on this. This is left as
an exercise to the reader.
The configuration in
config.ini should be fairly obvious and is
well commented. The look of the site depends on two factors, the HTML that is
generated, which is a clean HTML version 4.01 and has all formatting
controlled by the CSS file which was kindly provided in the outputs directory.
The templating code is very simple, it has two operations, TMPL_LOOP and
TMPL_VAR. TMPL_LOOP will loop over a variable, usually the Channels variable.
And the TMPL_VAR operator will emit that variable, there are the global vars
and the loop vars. The best way to figure it out is to use the existing
templates as a building block, they are fairly easy to understand.
Enjoy your new Planet!
Brought to you by a proud
