Planet Movable Type

By Arvind Satyanarayan on | Filed under Announcements | Comments (23)

UPDATE

I've had this idea swimming around my head ever since Planet Mozilla launched but never implemented it because until a few weeks ago I was under the impression that my host did not provide Python.

Anyways, announcing Planet Movable Type.

What is it?

Planet MT aggregates posts from the following weblogs:

and presents them in a variety of formats from headlines to full posts and RSS. The script is set to rebuild the files every half hour so posts may not show up instantly. There is a timestamp on the front page that shows last rebuild.

I've noticed that if a post is modified, then it shows up again on Planet MT. That's happened now with some old posts, anyone know Python to hack away at some files and see why its doing this and perhaps prevent it ?

Have I missed some weblogs that should be present? If so, post a comment.

UPDATE Ok I've been monitoring Planet and I've reached a conclusion though I'd like some feedback. The two del.icio.us feeds are flooding planet with a lot of duplicate posts and links to old content, should I just remove those two feeds so the information on there is more focussed ? I've actually removed the feeds and Planet is a lot more tidier but if there is demand for del.icio.us I'll look into creating another view!

23 Comments

Lola said:
on Dec 14, 2004 5:59 PM | Reply

Thanks a whole lot!!! I added the RSS feed to my Tb setup.

Michael Pate said:
on Dec 14, 2004 7:17 PM | Reply

A better-than-before replacement for the old MT Plugins aggregation page. This should prove very useful.

Joost Schuur said:
on Dec 14, 2004 11:01 PM | Reply

I noticed you were tying in to the 'movabletype' tag on del.icio.us. You might want to check out the mt tag too.

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on Dec 15, 2004 2:17 PM | Reply

Thanks Joost, its been added!

Mark Carey said:
on Dec 15, 2004 6:15 PM | Reply

Great idea.

I would be honored if you would add my MT Hacks blog to the list.

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on Dec 15, 2004 6:18 PM | Reply

It's been added!

Mark Carey said:
on Dec 15, 2004 8:02 PM | Reply

Thanks!

I agree with the removal of the del.icio.us feeds, since they are not real blog entries, it didn't flow very well.

Perhaps a seperate links or blogroll section is more appropriate for these feeds.

James Stewart said:
on Dec 15, 2004 8:04 PM | Reply

I'm definitely for the removal of the del.icio.us feeds too. I was actually about to email to request that when I saw this post -- they were filling my aggregator up just a little too fast.

Other than that -- nice site. Thanks for setting it up.

Mike Wills said:
on Dec 15, 2004 8:24 PM | Reply

Maybe if you do a daily set of links from del.icio.us like FeedBurner does. That might be a better way. I don't mind not having them, if you did, a set of daily links might be the way to go.

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on Dec 15, 2004 8:28 PM | Reply

The problem is, there's no way to group links in del.icio.us (or to be more correct, I've not found it) This means that links appear a gazillion times -- as was with the case with Planet MT and MT Plus Comment Spam Equals Dead Site

abhi said:
on Dec 15, 2004 10:09 PM | Reply

a very nice addition indeed. thank you...

Joost Schuur said:
on Dec 15, 2004 11:15 PM | Reply

I would include the del.ico.us links as a linkblog in the sidebar

James Stewart said:
on Dec 16, 2004 12:03 AM | Reply

Another del.icio.us option might be to write a tool that uses the delicious API to retrieve the links, then does its own work to group them, maybe remove any links back to this site, and then post them. It could be run using cron.

Matt Biddulph talks about delicious and his python API wrapper here.

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on Dec 16, 2004 8:33 AM | Reply

OK del.icio.us links now appear on the sidebar with a feed for them too!

Aine said:
on Dec 16, 2004 8:51 AM | Reply

For some reason planet.movalog.com has no Body background color specified, so in my browser (which I have set the background color to Pepto-Bismol pink for just this purpose), your feeds page is showing in a horrible pink color. Just wanted you to know that.

PS : I joined ProNet today. grins

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on Dec 16, 2004 9:28 AM | Reply

Thanks Aine, added the background color :)

Marie said:
on Dec 19, 2004 3:37 AM | Reply

Arvind, I don't know if this is a problem with Bloglines or if it's across the aggregator board, but some of the links are not clickable from Bloglines:

http://planet.movalog.com/861@http://www.elise.com/mt/announce/

http://planet.movalog.com/tag:www.sixapart.com,2004:/pronet//9.1937

Whereas, others are clickable:

http://www.rayners.org/2004/12/thefutureof_r.php

Thanks so much for providing this great service.

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on Dec 19, 2004 5:58 AM | Reply

Yep I've seen this problem but I'm not sure why its happening...

Arvind Satyanarayan said:
on Jan 16, 2005 4:24 PM | Reply

Its been added :)

Arve said:
on Jan 17, 2005 8:43 PM | Reply

You might want to add me as well:

William said:
on Mar 5, 2005 1:31 PM | Reply

Very useful additions. Thank you very much.

Billy D said:
on Apr 25, 2005 10:31 PM | Reply

These feeds are an exceptional resource for the fellow blogger!