planet larry complete reboot

The time has come to make some major changes to Planet Larry, to keep things simplified and make life easier on Alex and I as well. Lots of stuff has changed, and here’s the summary:

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. 🙂