Alex said:
Sorry I didn't mean to come across with any attitude but
I think on re-reading your post and my post I think I miss understood
you at first glance.
First email of the day, some slack should be cut
Oh, of course, and I didn't read any attitude into your post.
But, now that you mention it ...
Except that such a URL suggests it is an "official" Ruby feed site, and
all issues associated with that (what feeds are included, or left out,
who decides this, is content restricted, and so on).
That's entirely your choice, there will be nobody pointing
guns at you demanding that you view any web pages that
you don't want to, nor will any existing pages be deleted stopping
you from carrying on your current activities
Of course. Such sites may suit many people, but there is still a need
for some reasonably updated list of feeds for people who want to
assemble their own feed buffet. A Planet-type site, assuming it also
listed its sources, could possibly do that, but it runs into something
of the same problem as with the RubyGarden wiki page: How does it stay
up-to-date? A core group of people scoring the Web for new sites? Site
owners adding/amending their own sites? Some mix of these?
The interesting thing about the RubyGarden page is that, to me, the
sense of a shared culture in the Ruby community is getting stretched
thinner and thinner. There are many people who first think of the wiki
as the place to add or look for things, while there are many who may not
even know the wiki exists. We end up with multiple places that are all
attempting the same task. (I'm not entirely sure that is a bad thing,
or if the alternatives are any better, but I can see problems with it).
Pop quiz: Where do you go to see if some Ruby user group exists?
Its really quite a simple setup, the aggregate software
is hosted here, OSS free download, requires python to run though.
http://www.planetplanet.org/
You need a web server to run the software obviously, and
an active maintainer is also necessary because you must
setup which blogs you want monitored, planet will then
catch new posts and.. well.. aggregate them into a website.
Yes, it should be setup to show which feeds it is monitoring,
as well as having google searchable rss links.
I've no doubt someone has already written such a beast using Rails.
Probably more than one person.
The issue is not software, but maintenance. I tend to prefer a means of
autodiscovery rather than rely on, or burden, any group of people to
stay on top of things. (For example, a reasonably unique phrase in a
site's metadata might make it easily locatable via search engines. )
...
Now google could quite easily return these as its top two results:
#1
http://www.artima.com/buzz/community.jsp?forum=123/
#2
http://planet.ruby-lang.org/
Which do you think will get more clicks, further more, which _should_
be getting more clicks?
Depends on the description and page title shown by the search engine.
One nice thing about search engines is that catchy URLs are increasingly
less important. But I get your point. (Though I wonder how many
people know what the 'planet' part of the URL implies. It's not
intrinsic to the word itself, so it, again, becomes a cultural matter.)
All kudos's to artima, but they're mainly
a java house iirc, so having a choice between being on a sub domain of
a java house, or having a specific ruby planet I would have to say the
latter is better.
Artima hosts Ruby Code & Style and The C++ Journal. From discussions
with Bill Venner, I would be reluctant to simply label Artima "mainly a
Java house."
That's all I'm trying to say. I know its probably not going to happen
because I cant personally spend the time, and don't have the
resources or the permission to do so.
This is an issue for many people, and why distributed resources are
often a better option.