2 Minutes To Your Own Planet

Heh! Please don’t mistake me for one of those LHC guys. No, I am not talking about planets as in heavenly bodies which reflect lights from the stars but have give out no light on their own. I am talking about planet as in a feed aggregator.

Firstly, planet is a web based feed aggregator software developed in python. Planet was originally developed for GNOME and Debian. It can parse RSS, Atom and RDF feeds.

So, let’s get started up.

First step is to download planet software from here or checkout the latest stable bzr version from here.

Then untar the file if you downloaded the tarball.

tar -xpvf planet-xx.tar.bz2

Now untar the planet tarball and install the planet files eg.

tar -xpvf ~/planet-2.0.tar.bz2

cd ~/planet-2.0

su

./setup.py install

Now we need to configure the config.ini file in fancy directory to get started quickly. If you wanto take your time

vim examples/fancy/config.ini

Look at the file, it’s nicely commented you should have no problem at all in configuring it to your tastes, believe me. It’s too easy.

I set my output directory as

output_dir = /var/www/localhost/htdocs/planet

cp -R examples/output/* /var/www/localhost/htdocs/planet

This will place all the output files in the planet and the second command will copy the images folder and css file to the DocumentRoot so your page renders well.

Now to generate the output

./planet.py examples/fancy/config.ini

Now you can install the planey.py and planet-cache.py to /usr/bin using setup.py so that you can run it via cron

./setup.py config && ./setup.py install

crontab -e

0 * * * *   /usr/bin/planet.py /home/user/planet-2.0/examples/fancy/config.ini

Now open up your web browser and point to localhost/planet. Of course you need a web server running on localhost to try this out.

To show your image, put it in /var/www/localhost/htdocs/planet/images

Happy journey. Enjoy the feeds on your own planet!

3 thoughts on “2 Minutes To Your Own Planet

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