I know I've played with Feedburner in the past, and kind of flip-flopped on whether to use it or not, but this time I'm sure I'm gonna stick with it.  It's better for users, since they will always have a feed available (whether I have issues or not), and it's better for me since I can offload that part of the network traffic, which is actually quite a lot.

I've already updated the feeds and my apache config to do a permanent redirect, but if you want the feed URLs directly, here they are:

• Planet Larry: http://feeds.feedburner.com/planet_larry
• Larry the Universe: http://feeds.feedburner.com/universe_larry

Sorry for the inconvenience.  It seems like everytime I post about Planet it's bad news or maintenance.  Believe me when I say that it aggravates me far more than it does you.

Specifically, the issues I'm having is that Apache is sucking up all the available RAM, of which I only have 360 megs on my account.  It's then rolling over to using all the swap space as well, which only slows things down even more.  I've just started playing with tweaking the MPM configuration a bit, and I'm still trying to find a reasonable solution for my configuration.

In the past, the Linode had been seizing up occassionally, and I'd normally just reboot it and get on with my life.  Recently, I installed monit (an awesome app), and pinpointed that the issue seems to always be with apache.  Now, I'm just trying to narrow it down even  more from there, but offloading the RSS feeds seems like a good step to take anyway ... I get gigabytes of traffic per month just on that, believe it or not.

I'm toying with the idea of setting up lighthttpd instead, but I really prefer apache, and would rather set it up to behave in a low memory environment instead.  So, for any downtime in the near future, chances are it's just me tweaking something.  At least now, thanks to monit, I have a much better idea of when something goes wrong.

Oh, one other tweak I've made is that the planet script itself is more robust as well.  That thing used to run out of control, but I've made some changes that will ensure that if it runs away, at least it won't bring down the system.  I also started playing around with the idea of writing my own feed parser to replace the Planet software completely, and it looks like it's going to be much simpler than I imagine.  I haven't actually started down that path yet, since I have bigger projects to complete, but I'm actually enthusiastic that it'd be far, far simpler than I imagined.

I've taken the old theme, which was in a competition by itself to see how ugly things could get, and unceremoniously shot it behind a barn.

I don't know if this is to spec or not, but some version of Wordpress sometimes will set the updated date to all posts, regardless of their original publish date. The default planet configuration is to display the posts that fall within the recent date range, using updated over published when pulling the Atom XML files.

What I have been doing is just tweaking each user's config whenever the problem arises and then flushing the cache and repulling everything, and that has worked out well. Today, I finally went on the warpath a bit for Planet Larry, and just changed everyone's config who was using an Atom feed to use their RSS2 one instead. Plus, I globally set the config to ignore the "updated" tag in feeds (in case any Atom ones do creep in).

I guess I'll see what happens for now. Hopefully, less issues.

Edit: And, of course, after clearing the cache ... one gets through. Rawr.

Edit: That won't work either, it screws up LiveJournal posts.  Bleh.  Well, I think it's all fixed now, though Google Reader might be whacked for a bit ... but they're doing some caching on their end, too, not much I can do about that.

The reason I ask is because I'm trying to debug some issues with planet -- both Gentoo's and Larry's.

Oh, and apologies to everyone for breaking Planet Gentoo today. I spent a lot of time cleaning up a *lot* of cruft that should have been fixed for some time now. Chances are, too, that things will only get a bit more misarranged over the next few days as I tweak and test things some more, so bear with me.

Update: jsled had a good comment -- why not just look at the access logs? Well, duh, why didn't I think of that. -_- I don't have access to Planet Gentoo's, but Larry breaks it down well enough. It looks like, as far as programs go that are leaving a user agent, akregator is first with 19%, liferea is next with 6%, then Gregarious, RSSOwl and NetNewsWire with all less than 1% each.  The rest are browsers or Unknown.

I realize it's a small case of me shoving my own preferences down the pipe, which is something I avoid as much as possible.

If I'm going to add on one more asinine policy requirement, I figure it's fair that I take one away as well, though most people probably don't notice or care about this one. I prefer to have the blogger's name show up as the blog title, and have in just about every case (minus one) forced them to be that way.  But, I've changed my mind there as well, so if you want to customize the name on the feed, I can do that for you.

An example would be that my blog (wonkablog) shows up in the list as Steve Dibb (my name).  So, if you wanna change it from displaying your name to something else, just drop me an email.

And, as always, more bloggers are welcome to sign up.

It would be nice to have the archived pages put the dates in the title tag, but looking through the Venus code I couldn't really see a quick way to do that, so meh.  I could probably just write a quick sed line to fix it when its archived, I suppose.  I'll look at it later.  Or let someone else figure it out for me.

Oh, also, just a reminder, Planet Gentoo stores archives as well, though there's no index page or search index yet.  Another item on my long to do list.

Well, I got tired of it not working, so I re-registered it, and it redirects once again as normal.

Also, we can always use more bloggers -- if you have a Gentoo blog, lemme know about it, and we'll get you added.  It's a very informal process, just send me an email with your blog URL and stuff.  Now that I think about it, I really need to catch up with all the new Gentoo devs and get them on Planet Gentoo as well. Slack...

Finally, I decided I'm going to create a feed specifically for ex-developers, but since I'm too lazy to go out and find their blogs (and I don't think I still have an old copy), if you guys could send me your info, that would greatly help to speed things along. Update: It's too much work to create a separate feed, so I just put them back in the main feeds. Now, behave.

And here's an image just because this blog post is so boring, it needs one.

Something interesting I realized the other day is that Universe gets about 5% of the traffic that Planet does. As a result, I changed it from updating twice an hour to once every 2 hours. Planet, on the other hand, I changed it from twice an hour to every fifteen minutes, and I might make it update even more frequently than that.

Anyway, all that's changed is a bunch of boring backend stuff, which was some much needed cleanup that I've been putting off for a very, very long time. The fact that planet has been a maintenance nightmare is what has mostly kept me from dragging my feet on getting anything done, but now that that headache is gone, I feel hugely relieved.

There's still more stuff to do, but I think I'm over the worst of it. What I'd like most is to work on next is getting the actual frontend cleaned up, and get a new design. That's not really my thing, so if someone can help out, that'd be much appreciated.

One thing I get asked for every now and then is if I have archives of past posts. Well, I do now. I just copy the HTML file of the last post to $date one each run. A simple and unelegant solution. I'll be doing the same thing for Planet Gentoo soon.

Also, fixed the FeedBurner link on the main page -- I didn't even realize it was broken. While I was at it, I created one for Universe as well.

On the packages website, I finally fixed it so you can search against just packages again. That's been annoying me for a while. By default the search is way too wide, I think. It will search the full atom, the package description and the package name. I have to do the package name twice because of regular expressions (starting with, ending with, exact matches, etc.). And there's still no simple way to search for packages containing multiple words, which is also an annoying little bug. Advanced searches for GPNL and Packages has been something I've wanted to do for a long time, but have been putting off since I started the projects. Sheesh. Every time I sit down and start to poke at it, though, I realize just how big a beast it is, based on what I'd like to accomplish. I really need something for the interim, though.

Anyway, I better quit before this post gets any more boring. One last thing -- we can use more users who are Gentoo users and have a blog on Planet Larry. Just drop me an e-mail and I'll get you setup.

I setup the planet feeds mainly so that regular users of Gentoo Linux could talk about and share their experiences, and I want to get back to keeping it with them primarily in mind. I tend to think that ex-developers have more weight with their posts, which tends to cause some unbalance that I was never comfortable with.

Speaking of users, I am always looking for new bloggers to get added, so if you are a Gentoo user who blogs about computer experiences, be sure to sign up.

That's all for now.

Edit: I originally took this post down, and am now restoring it. I still haven't decided if this is a permanent change or not. I might create a planet just for ex-developers, or reintegrate them somehow. I dunno. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

There's no need to update your RSS readers if it handles redirects okay, but eventually the content for the main domain name will change -- not anytime soon, though, that's for sure, I have zero plans right now. Even when I do change www.larrythecow.org to something else, I'll still have the RSS feeds redirect so as not to break anyone's feed.

Anyway, you'll see why I'm moving to a subdomain here in a day or so.

Edit: More spring cleaning, now Universe has its own subdomain as well: http://universe.larrythecow.org/

There are now only two planet feeds, similiar to Planet Gentoo / Gentoo Universe, we have Planet Larry and a Universe feed as well. I'm using Planet Venus' filter option with a simple regular expression to filter out only certain topics to the planet. That means that the main planet will be mostly computer related stuff. The Universe feed remains the same as before, and pulls in everything.

The second thing that's happened is I'm dropping support of any languages other than English. Sorry to all the non-English blogging participants, but the thinking was this -- I only speak English (and Spanish), so for me to support other languages is not a reasonable expectation. Also, it's incredibly easy to setup your own planet feed, so if some Gentoo users want to get together and make their own feed, then go right ahead. Even the most popular non-English feed was getting about 5% of the hits that the main feeds were, so it's not worth the effort to keep it up. I'm also going to stop including feeds that are *only* non-English (again, sorry), since frankly, I have no idea what they are saying, and again it's gonna be easier to start your own. If you speak English and another language, that of course is fine. The filters for the Planet feed will probably kill most non-English posts anyway. If someone is really really interested in keeping theirs alive, then contact me and we can work out a way to manage it yourself.

Now, as far as the filtering on Planet / Universe, right now it's really simple. In fact, the exact expression is this: "filter = [Ll]inux|[Gg]entoo|[Cc]omputer|emerge|portage". It sucks, I know, because I'm not even doing case insenstive matches. I just need to read the docs some more or figure out how to hack the source code a bit to figure out how to get it working so I can add that. Also, that filter isn't set in stone ... I'll be adding more keywords as I see them commonly cropping up. And of course you can subscribe to the Universe feed if you like instead, and get everything unfiltered.

Alternatively, and this is really cool, I can change the regexp filter for each planet feed. So if you want your filter to be more permissive (or restrictive), then just let me know.

That's it for now. I hope everyone enjoys the new changes. I already like the Planet feed's "on-topic" style already, myself. Feedback is always welcome though. I get about 3 comments a year, so don't be shy.

 Update: I've expanded the regexp quite a bit, and at the same time cleared out a lot of dead blogs and links.  So you should be seeing more content and less deadbeats.

I should probably elaborate what's happening.  Using liferea, with the RSS 2.0 feed for Planet Larry, the posts from ~5 days ago always refresh as "new" posts.  It's really odd,  especially since it's the only one of all my feeds that does it, and of all the ones on Planet Larry, it's just the RSS 2 one that is doing it.  The Atom one is fine.  Who knows.  It could just be a bug.

Also, I added a link to the Feedburner version of the RSS feed. If you wanna use that instead, have at it.

The old universal planet feed is still available, but it will eventually be going away.  You can get it at http://planetlarry.org/planet/ but this one will only update on a daily basis instead of every 30 minutes like the main feed.
More changes coming on the way, though they are probably going to be trickling in for a while. One thing I'm thinking of doing is kicking off any subscribers who only post partial RSS feeds. That's a part of my general "get rid of annoying stuff" directive which you'll see more as I get my backend admin cleaned up. Venus' ability to use regular expressions to filter posts is going to also play a big part in that.

As always, let me know if general problems with the feed / page, and we'll try to get it taken care of. And send in some hackergotchis / avatars.

I already know the posts on there are a bit whacked, it's because I cleared out the cache completely.  It'll fix itself right as it pulls in new feeds, so don't worry about it.

I also cleared out a few users whose blog was getting a 404 page not found error.  So if you want to be back on there, let me know that, too.

Right now it's nothing more than a small db schema and an ugly front page that I use.  I'm still undecided how to  integrate user interaction so they can do their updates, so I'll come back to that later.  But, at least I've got something.  And believe me, anything will make the entire process go much faster.

The next project on my plate is to finally tackle the problems with the planets. Specifically, Planet Gentoo, Gentoo Universe, Gentoo Developer Blogs and Planet Larry. I have been putting this off for a very long time, and there's a lot to be done. Things have been nagging me, and it's time to finally clean things up and do them right.

The first two (Planet Gentoo and Gentoo Universe) are actually pretty good to go. The only thing I'm looking at that might change them is the backend we use. I'm experimenting / playing with Planet Venus, which isn't so much a fork as much as a lot of fixes to Planet. I'm already running a copy of it on Planet Larry to see how well it works, and so far it's been great. The things I like the most are that it uses less memory, can update more than one feed at a time, and most of all, lets you filter out posts using regular expressions. For those on Gentoo's planets, that last point could prove incredibly useful for those who don't have a blog that let's them setup categories.

The only other changes that would go into those is creating some tools to help me manage and take care of users more easily. It has long been a royal pain in the butt to manage planet's files because it is essentially one large .ini file where you have dozens of entries. I'm first going to write a frontend that I can use to automatically generate the .ini files for each user, instead of all in one global file, and store them in a small database. That way, making minor changes will be a simple feat.

For Planet Larry, I'm going to take it a step further and let users manage their feeds themselves. I'll have an entire user authentication system where they can login, set their feed URLs, choose their language, set their location, etc. so that Alex or myself don't have to do it all. The only thing left to us to administrate would pretty much authorize any changes -- which isn't as bad as it sounds, it's just that in the past we've had people want to get on the planet for nothing more than pure self-promotion, so we can't just automatically include anyone on there or we'd get spammed.

Something else that I'm going to do when I setup the new user administration system is this -- purge all the entries and start from scratch. I'll let anyone sign back up and get back on, of course, but I want it to be completely voluntary.

Planet Larry has grown quite a bit, and while my original idea of pulling in anything from anybody who randomly mentions Gentoo now and then was fine for when there was a few people, the scenario now is that most of the content is off-topic completely, and makes for some pretty boring reads sometimes. If there's some interest, I can easily setup a filtering mechanism and / or let users choose which categories to be pulled into the feeds, so we can have a Planet / Universe mix of on and off-topic posts. The real hurdle is just getting a frontend setup to manage all the data, and once that's done, we'll be in a position to make a lot of customizations. One idea I really like is to even setup personalized planet feeds, where you can ignore some users if you'd like.

That's what I'm going to be working on soon. If you have any comments or suggestions, now is the time. Just ping me at my gentoo.org e-mail address (beandog) if you have any ideas.

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

Enjoy.

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

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.

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.