Planet is a

feed aggregator Feed or The Feed may refer to: Animal foodstuffs * Animal feed, food given to domestic animals in the course of animal husbandry ** Fodder, foodstuffs manufactured for animal consumption ** Forage, foodstuffs that animals gather themselves, su ...

that runs on a

web server A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiate ...

. 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 truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

s of members of an

internet community A virtual community is a social network of individuals who connect through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Some of the most pervasive virtual communi ...

and display them on a single page.

History

Planet was written in

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pr ...

and maintained by

Jeff Waugh Jeff Waugh (also known as "jdub") is an Australian free software and open source software engineer. He is known for his past prominence in the GNOME and Ubuntu projects and communities. Career In 2004, Waugh was hired by Mark Shuttleworth as ...

and Scott James Remnant. 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 d ...

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

Python License The Python License is a deprecated permissive computer software license created by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). It was used for versions 1.6 and 2.0 of the Python programming language, both released in the year 2000 ...

, Planet is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

Adoption

Planets are commonly associated with

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

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

References

External links