Planetoid

Planetoid is a lightweight planet, for small communities who want to aggregate their feeds and projects in one single place.

Dependencies

Planetoid is a rails app, so this means you need to have ruby and rails installed. You can find more info about Ruby on Rails framework on rubyonrails.org

Also, Planetoid requires the following gems:

• Feedzirra, to fetch the feeds. github.com/pauldix/feedzirra
• Sluggable Finder, to generate user permalinks. github.com/ismasan/sluggable-finder

You can install these gems manually or running:

  sudo rake:gems:install

Installation notes

• Copy the provided config/planetoid.yml.example as config/planetoid.yml and edit it to change the default admin login and password, or any other config settings
• Copy the provided config/database.yml.example as config/database.yml and edit it to point to your databases
• Run "rake db:migrate" to create the tables
• Launch the server and visit the site.

Basic administration

From the initial install, you’ll be prompted to create your first users and feeds. When you access these admin sections, you’ll be asked for the admin login/password that you should define previously on the config/planetoid.yml file.

To identify yourself as an admin, just go to /login

Feed parsing

Just add your feed URLs and they’ll be parsed automatically when they’re created.

There is a rake task that will update all the feeds, you can put this into your cron to automate it:

  rake planetoid:fetch:all

Some Extras

• Google Analytics support. Just include your Google Analytics tracker number on the config/planetoid file and the code for Google Analytic will be included on the site (only for production environment). This number is something like UA-123456-78, you’ll find it on your Google Analytics tracking code.
• Twitter integration. You can specify a twitter account to send twitts to it and notificate of new members, feeds, entries and projects.

List of sites using Planetoid

Here’s a list of sample sites using Planetoid. If you want your site to be added, just send me a message.

• spainrb.org
• planeta.aspgems.com
• planet.flowersinspace.com
• planet.beecoder.com
• planetgirona.net

To Do

This is just a prototype, so you can expect new versions soon. Features I’d like to add:

• Auto-discovery of feeds from user urls
• Auto-fetch feeds when they have not been updated since a given amount of time
• Show latest post by each user
• Order users by recent activity
• Twitter status parsing for all users
• Pagination
• Twitter integration so it shows the updates on a given twitter account
• RSS for the whole site or by individual users
• Templates
• Internationalization
• Mocks
• On users profile, store only twitter and github nicks, not the full URL. Validate its format (begins with @ or not, etc.)
• Calendar showing activity

Thank you!

I wanted to thank the whole Ruby community and following people in particular:

• Paul Dix (pauldix.net) for his wonderful Feedzirra parser
• Emili Parreño (eparreno.com) for his template
• Juan Gallego Galisteo (juan.gg/) for his comments, ideas and code contributions (constants DRY up, SHA1 and more)
• Ismael Celis (estadobeta.com/) for his wonderful Sluggable Finder gem
• Javier Ramirez (github.com/javier) for his contributions on twitter integration
• Juan Lupión (github.com/pantulis) for his contributions on feed parsing optimization and others

License and copyright

This app is MIT licensed, wich basically means you can do whatever you want with it, and there’s no warranty of any kind. Read the MIT-LICENSE file to get the details.

However, if you like it I would like you to send me an e-mail letting me know, also I’d like to receive your feedback and suggestions.

Thanks!

© 2009, Jaime Iniesta (jaimeiniesta AT gmail DOT com) jaimeiniesta.com