SimPlanet2

Today (and yesterday), I spent some time trying to upgrade the Planet! software that runs Planet Perl and friends to the latest version.



I said "trying", because I'm declaring the upgrade a failure.

It appears to be because I'm testing by running two "update"s in a row, and it doesn't like rapid updates within the same minute or something, but it seems to randomly decide to only include certain people in the output. (And no, it's not always the same people.) That just isn't good enough. I could dive into the python code and fix it, but there are many other things on my todo list, and the old code works just fine, 99% of the time. It was also complaining bitterly about the RSS2.0 <items> block, so I had to tweak it for that.

Of course, instead of giving up, I got persistent, and it seems to be working ok now.

So... lets start over....

Tonight, I upgraded Planet Perl (and Parrot, and Six Perl) to the latest, greatest, Planet! Feed Aggregator.

While I was at it, I took the time to tweak the look of Planet Perl. (Thanks for the comments on the previous post.)I fixed up the CSS a bit, although it still needs more work. We're almost at the point where we can have alternate stylesheets. I did make one controversial change, which is to have it be full-width. The fixed-width we were using was a little too narrow, and picking another arbitrary width seemed silly.

Anyway, now I can leave this alone for a while.

SimPlanet

I don't like how Planet Perl looks. There's too much content, its too vertical. And it doesn't help that PlanetPlanet is showing stories from last June.

Over the past few days I've played with trying to only show short summaries, alternate sidebars and fancy javascript controls. But I didn't find anything I liked.

In a few days I'll come back to this. Anyone got any new ideas?

Planet Perl June Update

Welcome perlcast and Chip Salzenberg to Planet Perl.

I'll admit to not having listened to any of Josh McAdam's perlcasts yet, but they look cool. Chip has been writing up some very interesting things about Parrot recently.

More mail than you can shake a stick at

Today perl.org absorbed almost 30,000 spam and virus emails.

About 1/3 of that is viruses caught by clamav.

Plus at least another 12,000 invalid messages we never accepted. And I'm sure there's another huge bunch thats not getting logged properly

Then there's the huge portion of the internet that's outright blacklisted.

Without qpsmtpd, we'd be lost.