Tag: planet

Posted on by — Leave a comment

You can now opt in to share your blog posts on GNOME’s Discourse

We’ve just rolled out a new feature on Planet GNOME to bring our community discussions together! You can now opt in to automatically create a topic on discourse.gnome.org whenever you publish a new blog post.

Having comments centralized on Discourse makes it much easier for readers to discuss your posts, while also ensuring that all interactions are moderated under the GNOME Code of Conduct for a safer, healthier space. It is also a great way to give your content a bit more visibility with the active Discourse community without any extra manual work.

This is especially handy if you run a statically generated blog without an existing comment section, giving your readers a dedicated space to share feedback.

This feature is completely opt-in, so nothing will change for your feed unless you choose to turn it on. To get started, simply send a merge-request to Planet GNOME adding discourse_comments=1 to your blog entry in our config.ini file.

For this to work, I got the Planet’s static generator to produce a custom RSS feed for the blogs that flag the discourse_comments property. Then, Emmanuele Bassi configured our Discourse instance with the RSS Polling plugin, which creates a topic for each RSS feed entry.

Since this is brand new, there might still be a few rough edges. If anything breaks or acts weird when you try it out, let us know and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can.

Happy blogging!

Posted on by — 1 Comment

On Planet GNOME and personal opinions

Putting on my Planet GNOME editor hat for a quick PSA!

Planet GNOME is a convenient aggregator for personal blogs by members of our community. While all content must follow our Code of Conduct, the views expressed in these posts are solely those of the individual authors.

They don’t represent or reflect the opinions of the GNOME Project as an entity or community.

To help highlight this, we’ve added a “Voices of the community” tagline to the website header. It links directly to our “Add feed” section, which also emphasizes that Planet collects the latest posts from personal blogs.

Enjoy the personal insights and variety of perspectives!

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Using Libravatar/Gravatar for your profile in Planet GNOME

Now that the new planet.gnome.org website is live, we have added Libravatar and Gravatar support. Instead of having the Planet website host user images itself, we are giving members the choice to use profile images/avatars from these services.

If you are interested in updating your profile picture, check out the instructions at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Websites/planet.gnome.org#adding-an-avatar and file an issue. Extra points if you do a merge-request! :)

The old hackergotchis are an important part of our community’s history, so I set up a static website to host the old files. Feel free to file an issue if you want yours taken down from there.

Posted on by — 3 Comments

It’s alive! Welcome to the new Planet GNOME!

A few months ago, I announced that I was working on a new implementation of Planet GNOME, powered by GitLab Pages. This work has reached a point where we’re ready to flip the switch and replace the old Planet website.

You can check it out at planet.gnome.org

This was only possible thanks to various other contributors, such as Jakub Steiner, who did a fantastic job with the design and style, and Alexandre Franke, who helped with various papercuts, ideas, and improvements.

As with any software, there might be regressions and issues. It would be a great help if you report any problems you find at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Websites/planet.gnome.org/-/issues

If you are subscribed to the old Planet’s RSS feed, you don’t need to do anything. But if you are subscribed to the Atom feed at https://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml, you will have to switch to the RSS address at https://planet.gnome.org/rss20.xml

Here’s to blogs, RSS feeds, and the open web!

Posted on by — 7 Comments

Rethinking Planet GNOME with GitLab Pages/CI

Some GNOME websites are getting modernized and simplified, but Planet GNOME has fallen behind. Not anymore. I started a prototype for a Python script to publish Planet GNOME with GitLab Pages/CI.

As Planet GNOME Editor, I am often asked to look for blog and syndication issues I couldn’t really address due to limited server-side access. With this, debugging indexing issues should be easier as it is just about looking at the CI job output.

Also, the Planet website is perceived as messy and outdated. So this work allowed Jakub Steiner to quickly jump in and restyle the page from a clean state.

Try it live at https://felipeborges.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/planet.gnome.org and let me know what you think. Keep in mind this is a proof of concept. Tips, feedback, and contributions are welcome in the project repo.

This still doesn’t produce the global Planet rss feed, just the webpage, but that’s in my TODO list too.

P.S.: I know feed readers/parsers can over-request rss/atom feeds. So I plan to cache data and use metadata to avoid redundant downloads before this is even considered as a replacement for the current Planet implementation. No worries. ;)

Posted on by

Project blogs are now welcome on Planet GNOME!

Historically Planet GNOME is the go-to place for those interested in following up with the work of GNOME community members, but with the rise of social media platforms and the downfall of blogs (and RSS feeds), one would think that feed aggregators would follow the path of losing popularity within our community too. Surprisingly that doesn’t seem to be the case for Planet GNOME.

In a poll recently made by Emmanuele Bassi in GNOME’s Discourse, the Planet was well ranked in the list of answers to the question “How do you find what people are working on?”. Conversations in the GNOME Hackers chat channel also led to this conclusion.

Given how useful Planet GNOME still is to our community, I think we should spend some time giving it some love and continue evolving the platform.

A historical “editorial” choice of Planet GNOME was to only include personal blogs. This was decided before I became an editor. The rationale was that this is a community space and by linking people to what they write, we are nurturing a community that puts people first. After all, GNOME is all about its people!

On the other hand, news.gnome.org was designed to be the go-to place for more formal/impersonal/institutional communication. In practice that didn’t work out so well as the website never reached as broad of an audience as Planet GNOME.

Also, as projects started to create their blogs (such as the Shell blog, GTK blog, etc…), people started to work around the editorial choice by adding multiple author feeds to the same blog. I think this seems to strike the right balance between personal and institutional communication.

So to help information spread broadly in our community, I (wearing my Editor hat) decided to lift this restriction. Now we started accepting project blogs too. Recently we added the Vala Blog, Accessibility Blog, and Flathub Blog. File an issue if you write for a GNOME related project blog that you wish to see on Planet GNOME.

While we are at it, interesting conversations are happening intending to improve the overall Planet GNOME experience and reach. Ideas and suggestions are being discussed in Discourse and you are welcome to join the conversation!