A Planet a Day, ...

posted 10:59AM Jan 11, 2008 with tags aggregation day jcr planet by Lars Trieloff

I am very happy to announce that dev.day.com, the company blog of my employer Day Software that lives up to the great work of my colleague Michael Marth is now adjoined by PlanetDay, an aggregation of private weblogs of Day employees. So if you would like to know what is going on in the minds of Day's employees, take a look at PlanetDay.

Planet Mindquarry is Back

posted 07:31PM Jun 15, 2007 with tags mindquarry planet venus by Lars Trieloff

Due to a harddisk crash Planet Mindquarry went last week offline. Thanks to Planet Venus and Open Source Web Design it is back to life now.

Fixing Planet Apache's OPML

posted 10:37PM May 06, 2007 with tags apache blogbridge opml planet by Lars Trieloff

Recently I changed my RSS reader setup to reflect the new features in Blogbridge 5: I no longer subscribe to the various planets I have been reading: Planet Apache, Planet GNOME, Planet Mindquarry, etc., but combine the ability of the Planet software to create an OPML file, containing a listing of all blogs aggregated, including their feed URL. Blogbridge in turn is able to subscribe to all feeds mentioned in such an OPML file, so I pointed Blogbridge to the OPML files of Planet Apache, Planet GNOME, Planet Mindquarry, etc, unsubscribed from all aggregated Planet feeds and are now subscribed to really many feeds ( I get this aggregated listing by publishing the OPML of all my subscribed feeds using the Blogbridge service, combined with Share Your OPML, a great service by Dave Winer).

There was only one problem: I suddenly lost all my Planet Apache subscriptions due to a mis-formed OPML file. Planet Apache's OPML file did not contain the feed URLs, so I investigated this issue and found a small bug in the OPML template that mixed up url and uri variables and is fixed by now. As a result, feed urls are in Planet Apache's OPML again and my feed list is again a little bit more interesting.

What makes a planet worth reading

posted 08:50PM Apr 16, 2007 with tags blogs community mindquarry planet by Lars Trieloff

Sandro and I had a small discussion today regarding Planet Mindquarry: I manage the subscriptions that will be aggregated in Planet Mindquarry and Sandro proposed to remove two bloggers who are Mindquarry developers but do not blog about Mindquarry as such. For me this is no big thing, as honesty and diversity is what makes a planet living and worth reading. This is why Planet Apache is one of my favorite reads: It allows me to see what people of a community I respect and value think. This means everything, not only Apache specific stuff. I see who moved recently, who makes great holidays and of course who codes interesting stuff. On the other side planets like Planet PHP or Planet Gentoo have a different policy: If you want your post to be on this planet, make sure it is relevant to the topic 'Gentoo' or 'PHP'. After having been subscribed to Planet Gentoo for a while (as a Gentoo user I thought it might be interesting to follow this planet), I quickly unsubscribed because the posts where too one-topic focused to keep me interested. Sure, the posts are relevant to the topic, but are they relevant to the people?

I see planet software as a community tool. I read blogs to learn about people, so I read planets to learn about communities. This is why I am looking forward to Planet JBoss: I am not a JBoss user, I am not that interested in the JBoss software, but I am interested in the JBoss community, as there are some clever guys behind this software.

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