Tag: planet

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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.

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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!

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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Also, the Planet website is perceived as messy and outdated.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. 😉

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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!