Keep Up to Date With Open-Source "Planet" Sites
by Reuven Lerner - Aug. 04, 2008Comments (3)- Related Blog Posts
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When you're working with a commercial software company, it's easy to keep up with their latest news: Between the company's Web sites, e-mail newsletters, conferences, and (increasingly) blogs, you can find out what is happening, and prepare yourself accordingly. Life in the open-source world is quite a bit messier, of course, in that there often isn't any central location or source for news. One of the key tools that the open-source community uses to keep in touch is blogs -- but it's not always easy to find all of the blogs on the subjects that interest you. That's where blog "planets" come in, providing a one-stop aggregation of many blogs on a particular subject.
The term "planet" comes from the name of a feed reader, developed in Python and using universal feed parser, to aggregate content from a number of blogs having to do with GNOME (an open-source GUI and desktop) and Debian (a popular distribution of Linux). The planet software does not seem to have been modified in some time, but it continues to be used by many sites beyond the original GNOME and Debian aggregations. Some other sites, such as "Planet MySQL," openly state that the original Planet software, as well as a PHP version of that program, have been replaced by custom code.
Reading a "planet" feed is not that different from reading a regular blog on a certain subject, in which there are multiple authors. You can read its contents in your Web browser, and you can get updates via RSS or Atom. The difference is that the "planet" feed is itself an aggregation of feeds from multiple locations. Each of the feeds has something to do with the subject at hand. The "Ruby planet" blog will thus be an aggregation of many blogs about Ruby. The "Perl planet" blog will aggregate blogs about Perl. And so forth. The person who establishes a "planet" site gets to determine which blogs are included, which means that the degree of relevance, as well as the number of included blogs, will vary from site to site.
Beyond the original GNOME and Debian planet sites, here is a list of some planets that I have found interesting and useful over the years, and which might also help you to keep up with the latest goings-on in your favorite open-source community:
The idea of a planet is that you get unfiltered access to a large list of blogs. If this is overwhelming, a number of languages and development frameworks also have "this week in..." sites, manually edited newsletters that allow you to keep up with much of the latest information, without being bogged down by the large number of postings that a planet can produce.
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