Planet Catalyst

2006-08-03T10:28:00-05:00

I just set up Planet Catalyst at http://planet.catalystframework.org to aggregate blogs about the Catalyst MVC framework. It is also linked from the main Catalyst homepage and Planet Perl so you can reach it from there. The planet is focused on articles related to Catalyst and friends which means it filters articles on catalyst, dbic, dbix(::|-)?class or html(::|-)?widget, h::w or handel (case insensitive). Let me know if there are any other topics of interest that should be included.

Planet Catalyst is powered by Plagger, a Perl-based RSS/Atom feed aggregator. Thanks to Tatsuhiko Miyagawa for writing Plagger and answering my questions on the #plagger FreeNode IRC channel. It was very easy to add filtering on keywords by specifying a rule in the config file.

If you have questions or would like a blog added, send email to the catalyst-dev mailing list, comment on this article or ask on #catalyst / #catalyst-dev perl.org IRC channels.

Planet Engines: Plagger and Planet

2006-07-30T23:16:00-05:00

Planet engines are applications that aggregate RSS/Atom feeds and generate composite feeds as well as a website. The generated feeds typically include RSS, Atom, FOAF and OPML. Two popular open source planet engines are Planet and Plagger. I've used both to create planet-style websites and here are my observations:

Planet: This is a Python-based planet engine originally created for Planet Gnome and Planet Debian. It is super easy to to install as there's not even really an install to speak of, you just untar it into place. The issue with Planet is that it has limited functionality and uses a monolithic architecture that makes adding features difficult. For example, the code to generate the HTML and XML files is in a 953-line file called __init__.py. I hacked a feature on to Planet a while back and had to modify some methods and add a new one to __init__.py. It worked but didn't seem clean or very maintainable so I'm reluctant to add even more features at this point. Here are my notes on Installing Planet.
Plagger: This is a Perl-based planet engine written by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa who currently works for SixApart, the makers of MovableType, LiveJournal, TypePad and Vox. Although Plagger is a planet engine it does a lot more and is really a pluggable RSS/Atom feed aggregation framework/platform that supports building planet-style websites via one of its many plugins. Its plugin architecture supports the following types of plugins: Aggregator, Bundle, CustomFeed, Filter, Notify, Publish, Search, SmartFeed, Subscription and Widget. Planet sites are generated by Plagger::Plugin::Bundle::Planet. Plagger will also send aggregated feeds to your email account using Plagger::Plugin::Publish::Gmail. This is similiar to what Newspipe (Python-based) does but Newspipe only does RSS to email. Configuring Plagger is simple once you've installed it, but installation can be tricky since it has many CPAN dependencies. However, it's not too difficult and I've done it on a dedicated CentOS server as well as on a shared hosting account at Dreamhost using these Installing Plagger instructions.

If you are interested in running a planet-style feed aggregation site, I highly recommend Plagger since it's just as easy to configure but has many more capabilities and a better architecture for extensibility. Installation takes a bit longer but give it a shot, it's worth it.

Dev411 Blog: Category plagger

Planet Catalyst

Planet Engines: Plagger and Planet