...planets!
And these planets make up a huge universe. How about we make a planet for donationcoder.com too?
Planetary AggregationAh, you don't know what on planet earth I am talking about. I am a fan of explaining with examples, so let me give you a few:
Planet Ubuntu
 The internet is a series of... | about ubuntu, and the people behind it, sometimes very personal |
Planet Python
 The internet is a series of... | dealing with python, application frameworks, and surprisingly: ruby |
Planet Debian
 The internet is a series of... | I don't track this one... |
Basically
Planet is a feed aggregator, it takes various feeds from various sites (mostly blogs) and merges them in one big list. You can think of it as kind of the old-buzz-speech "channel". One cannot directly post on a planet, the content is pulled from other sites.
By now y'all ought to have an idea of
what Planet does.
The internet is a series of...I thought we (mouser) could set up a "Planet Donationcoder" where the blogs of the people behind and users of donationcoder.com are aggregated, very much like Planet Ubuntu. It could include technical posts, announcements of new donationware (most likely duplicated in the forum; other solution/idea?), and yes, personal stuff too.
ReasoningBut what if you don't want
every single one of your post be planetized? AFAIK most popular blog systems let you assign keywords to posts, or you can put them in categories. Drupal uses the complicated term "taxonomy" and lets you have a
seperate feed for every taxonomy term, in this case "USA". I am convinced Wordpress can do the same.
So I could simply use the keyword donationcoder.com or DC and Planet Donationcoder could aggregate every post I assign this keyword (tag) to. Naturally the post can be in more than one category, can have more than one keyword or tag. Still I think most blog systems also have this kind of flexibility.
Furthermore, if simplemachines supports it, even new forum posts could be aggregated; maybe to make the aforementioned announcements easier.
Planet Donationcoder would be very much like a constantly updated version of
the introduce-yourself thread. At least that's one way to look at it.
Counter ArgumentsPeople are already busy posting on the forum and might be unwilling or unable to set up their blog just to be planetized. Forum activity could decline because people are busy posting and commenting on each other's blogs.
This could be a trend, a mere hype (however: some planets exist for a quite some years already).
TechnicalitiesThere is a
short but complete introduction at linux.com and also a more
long one with minute details at Linux Journal. Since Planet creates static pages server load would be minimal, except for maybe increased traffic.
The internet is a series of...
The internet is a series of...FinallyDespite the counter arguments (of which I am sure will be much more) I think this is yet another way to build a community. When a site has rss feeds they can be aggregated enabling me to "monitor" all the donationcoder folks at one place. The marketing term is "bringing them together".
I want to hear your ideas, your criticism, and your question.
