I built a planet
At work we decided that it would be nice to have a blog which would inform the world of what we’re up to. However we quickly realized that having yet another blog wouldn’t work, especially if people already have their own blog. Still a central page which shows our blogs would be nice. Luckily there are planets which aggregate multiple blogs. A quick search gave me venus, which takes a bit of work to get it going under windows but once it runs it’s easy to configure.
I’ve added the current 4 blogs of colleagues and I’m waiting for a company server to put the planet on.
Venus on windows
For Planet Essener I needed planet-software. Venus seemed to be easy to setup so I downloaded it. Somehow firefox produced a 0 byte zip file and also the tgz contained a 0 byte file inside. Wget-to-the-rescue solved it however.
Venus is written in Python and for windows you need to install the python-windows extensions. There is a very useful test script included in the Venus release that will tell you what you need to get extra filters and theme-engines running. This produced a series of errors and the more software I installed for the extensions the more errors occurred.
They looked like this:
======================================================================
ERROR: test_apply_filter (tests.test_apply.ApplyTest)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "C:\Documents and
Settings\steveno\workspace\venus\tests\test_apply.py",
line 100, in test_apply_filter
splice.apply(self.feeddata)
File "C:\Documents and
Settings\steveno\workspace\venus\planet\splice.py", lin
e 122, in apply
output = open(output_file).read()
TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, NoneType found
They all had a reference to a file in them. Since I had installed it in My Documents I figured that there was a problem with spaces in the path. (I realized this only after I sent a mail to the list). Installing it in c:\venus solved it. Later I got this mail from James Holderness who gave me a solution for the spaces:
I’ve had Venus running on Windows in a path with spaces. What I did was use
the 8.3 compatibility filenames everywhere in config.ini. For example, if
you need to refer to a path at \program files\venus you’d use path
/progra~1/venus. Also before running planet.py, I’d do “cd \progra~1\venus”
which ensured that my current directory was also space free. I think that
was all there was to it.
Once it is installed it is very easy to configure. I even managed to create a tag-filter so we can filter out personal posts from the various blogs 