Planet is a feed aggregator that runs on a

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

. It creates pages with entries from the original feeds in chronological order, most recent entries first.

Etymology

In online media a planet is a feed aggregator application designed to collect posts from the

weblog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

s of members of an internet community and display them on a single page.

History

Planet was written in Python and maintained by Jeff Waugh and

Scott James Remnant Scott James Remnant (born 18 July 1980) is an open source software engineer. Scott served as a long-time Debian developer until 2006 and worked as "Ubuntu Developer Manager" on the Ubuntu Linux distribution at Canonical Ltd. He now works at Goog ...

. There are several successors: Venus - started by Sam Ruby, Pluto - started by hackNY, a second project also name
Pluto
by Gerald Bauer, and most recently Moonmoon.

Design

Planet uses

Mark Pilgrim Mark Pilgrim is a software developer, writer, and advocate of free software. He authored a popular blog, and has written several books, including ''Dive into Python'', a guide to the Python programming language published under the GNU Free Docu ...

's Universal Feed Parser to

process A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic. Things called a process include: Business and management * Business process, activities that produce a specific s ...

feeds in RDF,

RSS RSS ( RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many ...

and

Atom Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a atomic nucleus, nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished fr ...

format, and Tomas Styblo's htmltmpl templating engine to output static files in any format. Released under the Python License, Planet is

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

Adoption

Planets are commonly associated with

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

projects, where they are used to collect posts from the various developers involved in projects.

References

External links