PlanetOSGeo

Planet OSGeo

Planet OSGeo is a window into the world, work and lives of OSGeo members, hackers and contributors. If you are a friend of the OSGeo Foundation and would like your blog aggregated here, please read on.

Credits

Planet OSGeo was implemented after the initial discussion was discussed on the mailing list. OSGeo thanks Christopher Schmidt and James Fee - pioneers of building geospatial planetariums. Planet OSGeo is based on Christopher's planet, James' is here:

• Planet Geospatial maintained by James Fee aggregates wide variety of geospatial blogs

Planet OSGeo Guidelines

Please, read the following sections where basic guidelines are explained.

Planet Citizens

• Planet is for any active and involved participant in the OSGeo Community.
• There are many ways of participating in the OSGeo, so all of types of involvement are considered for the purposes of inclusion in Planet OSGeo: our projects users and developers, speakers and advocates, translators, managers and presidents of OSGeo friendship companies and sponsors, etc.
• In order to help building the OSGeo brand and credibility, it's recommended the Planet is not formed by anonymous individuals but its members use real names. Also, heads are highly recommended.

Planet Content

• Planet OSGeo aims to aggregate the blogs of people who are active on OSGeo and not only to aggregate the blog posts about OSGeo.
• The Planet shall not do any content filter, however subscribed feeds ought to be at least occasionally relevant to OSGeo.
• All opinions expressed in syndicated blogs are of the original authors and should not be considered as official opinion of the OSGeo Foundation body.
• Planet users are free to submit "on-topic" posts by pointing specific categories/tags in their feeds. But other posts are also welcome.
• It's a good idea to stay away from advertising content (or content that might be confused as such) and from excessively personal information
• Please, don't annoy people

Feed Submission

• Feeds should provide stable permanent URL
• Broken feeds will be excluded from the Planet
• IMPORTANT: Please, check your blog with http://validator.w3.org otherwise your feed may seriously break the Planet OSGeo look & feel.

How can I add my blog

If you want to add your blog to the OSGeo Planet, send your request on planet at osgeo dot org specifying:

• your contact name
• your contact email
• blog URL
• blog feed URL (with the items you want to be displayed on Planet OSGeo)
• blog name
• primary language of your blog content
• (not mandatory but recommended) include your head picture of max size of 80x80 pixels

If you would like to syndicate only posts that belong to a particular category of your blog, you can do it by sending URL pointing to feed of that category, something that looks like:

http://blog.myside.org/category/osgeo/feed

Planet OSGeo Implementation

The Planet OSGeo - a website that aggregates blogs of active Friends of OSGeo and provide a window into the community itself.

Ticket #206 - Planet OSGeo RFC

Status: approved

Planet Configuration

• Maintainers: Mateusz Loskot
• Domain: http://planet.osgeo.org
• Software: Planet Venus as recommended by Chris and James
• Hardware: osgeo2

Update Steps

• Edit master configuration file

/osgeo/venus/planet_osgeo.config

• each entry should look like this:

# contact: contact@blogname.com
# added: 2011-07-14
[blog feed url]
name = blog name
link = blog url
face = head-blogname.png
facewidth = 80
faceheight = 80

• Save head image to

/osgeo/venus/themes/osgeo/heads

• Run update script as root user:

[root@planet]# python /osgeo/venus/planet.py /osgeo/venus/planet_osgeo.config
.......some errors/warnings will show here if feeds fail to download
[root@osgeo2]#

Troubleshooting

Stray Comments

The planet.py scripts are picky about formatting, a stray comment hash is enough to kill it. Confronted by this error: ...

 File "/usr/local/venus/planet/config.py", line 90, in <lambda>
   setattr(config, name, lambda section, default=default:
   ValueError: invalid literal for int(): 40 #25

Led me to check the /usr/local/etc/planet_osgeo.config file and change the "items_per_page = 40 #25" to "items_per_page = 40". I guess the config parser doesn't ignore comments after all :)

Test Scripts

There are two scripts that are run during planet updates, one spider.py and one splice.py. If wondering where the update process is breaking try running spider.py with the config file as a variable. Then followed by splice.py - it might help you understand where it's dying or at least if dying is related to grabbing the feed updates or not.

References

The Planet OSGeo proposal is based on definitions and rules described at following pages:

• Planet Debian Wiki
• Planet Ubuntu Wiki
• Planet Mozilla