Over the past few weeks, Utah Open Source (UTOS) has been working hard to provide a new version of the Utah Open Source Planet (UTOSP). This version is based upon the PlanetPlanet feed aggregator. The look and feel is modified from templates provided by the Fedora Planet. The Utah Open Source Planet at http://openclue.org, run by Gabe Gunderson, will continue to function for the foreseeable future.
Why the change?
The Utah Open Source Foundation has had in its plans for some time to create a Planet built solely from people providing useful technical experiences. Many of the blogs on the current UTOSP are political, religious and many other non-technical related topics.
The point here is that many people enjoy blogging about items outside open source and technology. While blogging about whatever you like is a fine thing to do, the new UTOSP will do its best to provide options for those individuals who prefer to just discuss technology. To that end, the new UTOSP will provide multiple options to the choosy reader. Of course there will be the full planet, with feeds from everyone, as well as a planet just for LUGs and Event announcements.
The Request
We at UTOS will be contacting those on the current planet. The plan will be to obtain a few feeds from each contributor. The feeds will be ‘general’ and ‘technology only’ or something along these lines. The idea is to provide options to our readers by providing them multiple ways to get at the information they’d like to read. If you are unavailable or unable to provide these alternate feeds, your blog will only appear on the planets for which you do have feeds, currently the ‘general’ planet.
The Future Planet
If the future plans hold, there will be a planet based upon popular categories and tags. These planets will be static at first, then move to a more dynamic ‘pick & choose’ functionality creating a dynamic page and rss feed associated with an account.
The functional site will, for now, provide simple rss feeds based upon requests made to clints@utos.org. Watch for these changes over the next few weeks and months and feel free to provide feedback as we really would like to hear from you. Comments here on this post or send an email. As always, come on by #utos on irc.freenode.net as well.
Cheers,
Clint