Great idea!
All those blog search engine feeds in there really clutter it up, though. The titles are really long, the entries are often abridged to the point of uselessness, and those search results completely swap the stream. I would hope that a topic-specific planet would aggregate all the most relevant feeds directly and not rely on search engines, so that it can be used as a relevance-prefiltered alternative to subscribing blog search feeds on my own.
So maybe throw those out, or (if Plagger can do that) banish them to a category that isn’t shown unless requested? Is that a reasonable request?
Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into making this less messy once the conference is over.
(I know it would be better if I could do it sooner but I don't have much free time during YAPC::NA).
I don't know if I will be able to remove all the search feeds - as I want to pick up blog feedback about the conferences. However, we probably are subscribed to too many of these and I need to investigate which of these is the best to use.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into making this less messy once the conference is over.
(I know it would be better if I could do it sooner but I don't have much free time during YAPC::NA).
I don't know if I will be able to remove all the search feeds - as I want to pick up blog feedback about the conferences. However, we probably are subscribed to too many of these and I need to investigate which of these is the best to use.
No problem, it was just a suggestion about how the planet could be more useful – which of course depends on who and what it’s meant for, and per your comment it seems you set it up primarily so you and other organisers could track coverage. Having the search feeds on there makes more sense then.
In that case, maybe you want to check out Yahoo! Pipes: you can use that to subscribe multiple search feeds, merge them, and pass them through the Unique operator to filter them for duplicate URLs. Then you can subscribe the planet to the unified output feed and only get one entry per incoming link. It will also let you use text filters to do basic title and content clean-up. Plagger should be able to do that and much more locally, of course – the appeal of Pipes is that you can literally set this up in two minutes by just clicking.