The birth of a planet
Kategorier: Nørderier , Udvikling
27. april, 2007
In case you don't know me, I am a member of a certain minority organisation. This organisation has for a long time been very secretive about it's dealings - and with good reason. However, the organisation has been opening up, and some of it's members have taken up blogging. What better than to make yet another planet?
A planet (for those few of my millions of readers who don't know), is a website that fetches blog entries of it's members and displays it in one place. This is an easy way to get to know what is happening in various communities.
The hottest software package out there for making these planets is PlanetPlanet However, this is written in python, which of course my cheapo webhost does not support. So I had to find something similar written in PHP. I found various projects out there, such as Xamango and Gregarius. The first being pre-alpha and the other not being flexible enough (well, it probably is if you take the time and study it), I decided that it couldn't be too hard to write a basic planet for my self.
And it wasn't. It took me around 2½ hours including planning and the re-learning of PHP to make a script that fetches the feed-URLs from a table in a database getting the feeds and putting the contents into another table, of course checking if the post is already in there. Then it was a piece of cake to write the front-end that shows the latest 30 posts on a simple page. This couldn't have been done without the help of MagpieRSS, a very nice script for parsing the feeds. The finishing touch was to find a service, that could run the feed-parsing script in regular intervals. For this, I currently use Monastic and it seems to work quite fine.
Actually, the thing I spent the most time on in this project, was fidgeting with the gotchis (the small faces of the bloggers).
The things missing from making this a nice little piece of software is:
- Some checking of the feeds - right now, I actually don't know what will happen if a feed fails to parse. Such an error will be in the feed-parsing script and not in the page that visitors see.
- A nice administration module - right now it is done by manually editing the database.
- A name, preferably something recursive. PIPE: "PIPE Isn't Planet Either" sounds horrible. Suggestions is encouraged!
The thing can be seen at http://dbmafia.kjoller.eu/
If anyone has ANY interest in looking at this software/script, you are welcome to comment or contact me in some other form. I haven't distributed it yet so it isn't under any license yet, but if/when it is, it will almost certainly be under the GPL.