Tuesday 10 May 2016

Planet Linux Australia... rebooted

Recently Linux Australia needed to move its infrastructure to a different place, and so we took the opportunity to build a fresh new instance of the Planet Linux Australia blog aggregator.

It made me realise how crusty the old site had become, how many things I had planned to do which I had left undone, and how I hadn't applied simple concepts such as Infrastructure as Code which have become accepted best-practices in the time since I originally set this up.

Of course things have changed in this time.  People blog less now, so I've also taken the opportunity to remove what appear to be dead blogs from the aggregator.   If you have a blog of interest to the Linux Australia community, you can ask to be added via emailing planet at linux dot org dot au. All you need is a valid Atom or RSS feed.

The other thing that is that the blog aggregator software we use hasn't seen an update since 2011. It started out as PlanetPlanet, then moved on to Venus, and so I've taken a fork to hopefully improve this some more when I find my round tuit. Fortunately I don't still need to run it under python 2.4 which is getting a little long in the tooth.

Finally, the config for Planet Linux Australia is up on github.  Just like the venus code itself, pull requests welcome.  Share and Enjoy :-)