wonkablog

Announcing experimental English-only feeds:

http://www.planetlarry.org/en/

Enjoy.

And for the record, we’ve got bloggers from 26 countries now.

In case you haven’t noticed, I made a few CSS changes to Planet Larry’s website the other day. It looks slightly less ugly now. I also added a default avatar for everyone who hasn’t sent one in, slackers.

I think I’m going to backpedal once again on promising the english-only feeds. The thing that you probably don’t realize is that providing it really isn’t going to change much of anything, since all but like four of our bloggers post in more than one language, and there’s no way to tag the languages of entries. So it’d be pretty much a lot of work, and you’d hardly notice a difference from the way it is now.

In other news, I’m still working on trying to get LiveJournal feeds syndicated properly, so you guys can use tags if you want to. It’s a work in progress.

Edit: Check this out.  Despite the author’s graciousness in providing it, I’d still like to get a local copy running somewhere so we don’t suck up all his bandwidth.   Too bad I can’t configure mod_perl to save my life.  If someone wants to host the script somewhere, lemme know.

One thing I promised when I first setup Planet Larry was to have an English only feed, and I still haven’t gotten around to that. The biggest problem that I’ve run into is I’m not sure how to handle the situation since some of our bloggers are bilingual. What I really don’t want is to make the project seem “Americanized” in any sense of the word, which is why the main planet feed pulls from all the users blogs, irregardless of their language or nationality.

However, the thing I realized is that in my effort to be friendly to all nations, it’s actually rendering it useless since everyone is going to have to filter through the languages they can’t read.

So, this is my idea. I want to make the “English” feed just like the other ones — if the blogger is bilingual, I’ll put their feed in both language feeds. At least that should be universally fair.

If anyone has any ideas, feel free to let me know.

Oh, one more point of clarification. A lot of times when I ask someone if they’d be interested in having their feed pulled on Planet Larry, their initial reaction is hesitance because they’re not “on topic” all, most or any of the time. Let me point out — there isn’t any on topic at all. Look at all the other planet feeds, most of them do not pull in two feeds based on on and off topic similar to Planet Gentoo and Gentoo Universe. I want our feed to pull in everything so we can get to know what’s going on in your lives. Nothing is off topic.

If you want though, it’s still up to you how you want your feed aggregated. If you want us to pull only a few categories (and if your blog supports that), then that’s fine. Also, if you have a LiveJournal account and you want us to create a category feed for you, that’s fine. Just e-mail me (beandog@g.o) and I’ll get you hooked up.

Here’s another status update report. As far as Planet Gentoo goes, there’s really not much to say. Things have been plugging away well. I have a few bugs I need to tend to, but nothing severe. I just noticed this morning that Planet Planet has released a version 2.0. I’d like to check that out and see if it offers any improvements.

The only thing on my wishlist right now for Planet Gentoo / Universe is a website redesign. Someone asked me once, “Why can’t we look nice — like Planet KDE?” Good question. I’m open to ideas.

Planet Larry is doing well, too. I have a lot of stuff I still need to work on, and I just haven’t had time. Since the flood of signups has stopped, I went ahead and setup three more language-only feeds, bringing the total to four:

• Planet Larry: German
• Planet Larry: Chinese
• Planet Larry: Polish
• Planet Larry: French

The Polish and Chinese ones only have two users each, with the French only one, but that’s fine. Right after I originally added the German one (which only had four at the time, I think), I immediately got a few more users wanting to get added. I’m hoping the same will happen here. I hope I didn’t forget any other languages to add right now (yes, English is coming, it’s not nearly as easy though).

What I’d really like to do is add one for spanish-speaking Gentoo users. I know they’re out there too. Vamos, che, quiero leer de que pasa en las vidas latinas con Linux. Y viva la Argentina.

Oh, and one nitpick I have — if you’re being pulled on Planet Larry, and I don’t have a province (or city, or county, or state, whichever is relevant) for your user, please send it in to me (email: beandog@g.o). It’s really cool knowing where everyone’s from.

One of the really cool things I like about Planet Larry is that we pull in feeds from bloggers all around the world. Obviously that was the general idea to start with, but to see it in action is just plain cool.

There are bloggers from Australia, Austria, Belarus, Canda, China, Denmark, England, Fance, Germany, India, Israel, Malaysia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Singapore, Thailand and the USA.

Something I’ve wanted to do since the start of this was to have different planet feeds for different languages. Now, this is in the very beginning stages, but at least I’ve started working on this. We already have four bloggers who live in German-speaking countries, so I’ve been playing with setting up their own planet feed first. Here it is: http://www.larrythecow.org/de/

The first question I know most of you are asking is if there’s going to be an English-only feed as well. The answer is yes, just as soon as I get some time. Managing a lot of planet config files isn’t the easiest thing in the world, but it is getting there the more I learn.

Anyway, that’s going to be the basic setup for the language-feeds. I’ll pull in those that blog in a certain language and live in a country that speaks that language as well. Also, since we don’t do any kind of international split on Planet Gentoo, I’m thinking of pulling in the developers blog’s as well into these, if no one is opposed to the idea. What do you guys think?

By the way, I have to thank everyone whose been so supportive of the idea so far. Especially to Thomas Cort (tcort) who is hosting the thing for us. Right on. I’m getting all weepy.

Oh yes, something I almost forgot — if I don’t have your province and country, could you e-mail me those so I can get them in the config files?  The Planet webpages display those now, along with a little flag.

Well, already it looks like splitting Planet Larry up into on-topic and off-topic feeds might be a good idea. Bah. I had really hoped I wouldn’t have to do all that extra work, but I think it would be very nice. Does anyone else feel the same way?

The one big problem I have with that though is how to split RSS feeds into categories when their blogging software doesn’t support them (I’m talking to you, LiveJournal). There’s only a few solutions I can think of, none of which are partciularly to my liking.

One is to have the users put “Gentoo:” or something similar in the title tag, then I would write a new backend (to either replace planet or regurgitate your feed) to grep those out that don’t match the topic. Another idea is to pull the feed myself and recreate it, and then give the users a very simple frontend to tick which ones they want pulled to the planet. I was hoping Feedburner would provide something like that, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Bummer.

Another option is this — get a free Wordpress blog and put my mind to rest once and for all. I love Wordpress. It works fantastic. I don’t want to force anyone to use something they’re not familiar or happy with though, just for the sake of being pulled into here (did I mention it would make my life easier, though?). It’s up to you, the users, really which software you wanna use, and I can take it from there. It’s just gonna take a little coding on my part. No biggie.

One last thing — thanks to Tomasz on showing me how to fix the max image size on the planet webpage. I gotta fix that on Planet Gentoo as well.

I’ve setup a category in my blog to be pulled to Planet Larry to let users know what’s going on with the development side.

Right now, things are going well, though we still need to add a lot more users.  I know there’s more bloggers out there — don’t be shy.  Get yourself added.

One thing we’re already getting is submissions for blogs in languages other than English.  Right now they are being pulled to the front page, but pretty soon here we’re going to set one up for each langauge.

Something else I’d like to add right away is display where all the users are from.  Not specifically of course, but it would be cool to know what country you are in.  So, e-mail me your country of residence and your province / state as well if you like, and soon I’ll have that be displaying on the front page.

One last thing — if you want a hackergotchi or avatar, go ahead and send them in.  Transparent pngs are preferred if you’re going to make a little bobble head of yourself.  And it doesn’t have to be a snapshot of your head.  Your favorite Tux icon or cartoon character would work, too.

Finally — tell your friends.  Send us their blog address and we’ll add them.  Get the word out.

Thanks, guys.  Feel free to ping me on IRC (Freenode, user beandog) or e-mail (beandog at gentoo dot org) if you need anything or have suggestions.

Responses have been positive so far to Planet Larry. I’m pretty excited by the idea, and I’m hoping we can get a lot of users on there. So far I’ve been telling everyone about it, hoping to get more people added. I posted a blurb about it to digg, so if you have an account, digg this baby.

Speaking of blogs, half the images on mine are broken. There’s actually a really funny, long story behind that of how I completely foobed up my mythbox (again). I’ll post that once I get some time.

In other Gentoo news, I’m a full developer now. Yay. Ironically, one of the teams I’m going to work on is a subproject of Quality Assurance.

I’m actually really excited to help out. I started with GNU/Linux back in 2001-2002 I think it was, and I started using Gentoo shortly after that, and haven’t gone back since. It’s going to be nice to finally be able to give back a little more to the distro that I’ve been leeching off of for years.

Introducing Planet Larry, an aggregation of blogs of Gentoo users.

A few of us in User Relations came up with the idea to have a planet feed that pulled subscriptions of blogs from our users that have anything to do with Gentoo. It’s not an official project, but that’s okay, it’s still just as cool. What we’d like to do is get anyone who writes about computer-related stuff and also uses Gentoo onto the feed. It’ll be a good way to see what you guys are up to, and at the same time hopefully bring the community together a little bit more.

So, if you use Gentoo and you blog, e-mail me your name and your blog’s website at beandog at gentoo dot org, and we’ll get you added. It’s that simple.