PlanetPlanet
Posted on 7th November 2006 by TaggyJust done with the installation of planetplanet in our institute.
For those who dont know what is PlanetPlanet .Its a RSS aggregator used to aggregate blogs (generally, though it can be used to aggregate just about all RSS). Its very powerful and it powers PLanetGnome ,PLanetLDTP,PlanetDebian and the list is endless.
But beware ,the official website doesnt have a installation manual .
So i thought i would write on how it can be done .
* Download the package from PlanetPlanet website .
* Untar it in to a folder in your webserver root directory or where you want planet to be accessible .
tar -zxvf planetplanet.xyz.tar.gz or tar -jxvf planetplanet.xyz.tar.bz2
*There are two templates that come along with package ,simple and fancy . Go to the template folder you want choose
cd fancy (in my case)
* The configuration file in config.ini in that directory ,the variables documentation is clear enough and at one glance you should be able to Change the Planet name ,owner and subscriptions .
* now come to planetplanet root folder and execute the python script or feed accumulator
python planet.pyv “Path to config.ini”
*You must be able to see on your terminal the feeds accumulated :)
* Now just check out the output directory through the web browser and you should be able to see planet planet in action .
* The template ofcourse can be changed by editing the fancy/index.tmpl file .
*Incase you access through a proxy ,the planetplanet wont work as such ,but a small tweak will do .
We use the Feedparser and urllib2 module in python ( so powerful )
look for the file __init__.py and edit it
Look for the line info=feedparser.parse (…) this is used to access feeds directly from web , all that we have to do is to make sure the info which is the feed can be accessed through a proxy .
proxy = urllib2.ProxyHandler( {"http":"http://nitt.edu:3128/"} )
info = feedparser.parse(self.url,
etag=self.url_etag, modified=self.url_modified,
agent=self._planet.user_agent,
handlers = [proxy])
now run the python planet.py “Path to config.ini ”
and your planet should be up and running .
And yeah the link for people inside it is http://178.1.2.116/planet
[...] Bringing together a community has become very important these days. Simpley because ,in a community you might have a lot of like minded people and others expressions might be important to others.But asking everyone to write at one place can not be always possible.The planetplanet offers a wonderful yet very very simple solution. The rss aggregator with a templating engine. What planet does it ,it simple fetches all the contents or feeds from various blogs (All blogs do have a rss feed basically a simple XML file with predefined or globaly used tags ,so that it can be easy to parse) .and when the content is fetched just use a simle html template generator,and put it on to the web .A solution that i applied to my institute wherein we fetch all the blogs by students and it provides an amazing read to look what our own friends have to say about things happening in and around us. Same solution can be applied to projects especially when they are colobarated over the internet.Where all the developers blog can be read at one single place and it does not take much space too ,as the engine does not save pages or images it simples keeps them in static html file overwritten everytime a feed is fetched. Linux Desktop Testing Project (LDTP) a project that i have been working with for 4 months now uses planet to read all developers blog ,given we have people from china too. you can check them at ldtp planet . Unfortunately it doesnt come with a installation manual on the web although they have put in a READ ME in download directory . Although you can check out a installation READ ME here var dc_UnitID = 14; var dc_PublisherID = 2458; var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘green’; var dc_adprod=’ADL’; [...]
