Terraforming Planet Ubuntu
Planet Ubuntu has long been aggregating the many musings of Ubuntu Members out there and giving everyone a glimpse into their own personal worlds. It’s been diligently serving up hundreds of RSS feeds since the birth of the Ubuntu project.
Unfortunately… Planet Ubuntu is dying…
The current server is running on old infrastructure that is scheduled to be shutdown early next year. Planet, in it’s current incarnation, also relies on Bazaar which is also scheduled to be sunsetted next month.
I had an idea… Let’s terraform Planet Ubuntu! (No, not the Hashicorp kind of terraform) There is still enormous value in keeping this community resource and Ubuntu Member perk alive. We also have a litany of tools and services out there that can readily replicate it’s function.
- A bit of HTML, CSS and JS
- Vanilla Framework to make it shine
- GitHub Actions to scrape and process RSS feeds
- Github Pages to display it all
And you get…
Help with the terraforming effort
Here are a few tasks that are left to be tackled that you can help with!
Cleanup of dead or misconfigured feeds
To populate this new Planet, I pulled the existing feed list from Launchpad. On first run, I realized there are a ton of dead feeds - 404s a plenty. Here is the current list of bad feeds that return a 404 or don’t supply a proper RSS feed. If your blog happens to be on that list, please update the URL and add it over on feeds.json.
User icons
The planet has always sported user icons (often times floating heads of the blog’s author) next to their owners most recent post. These aren’t essential, but they add a bit of fun and personality. In theory, it would be pretty easy to add this into a new Planet and here are just a few ways that come to mind:
- Add a image field in the json for members to put a link to an image of their choosing.
- Pull the portrait image from Launchpad with the corresponding username.
- Pull profile image from Gravatar or libravatar.
Membership checker
Another missing piece is a routine script (Github Action) that checks to ensure the Planet is only being inhabited by current Ubuntu Members. This is a fairly trivial check of ‘nicks’ from the feeds list against the Ubuntu Member list on Launchpad.
And more!
If you have other ideas or thoughts on how we can make this new planet a real utopia, feel free to share them below or drop in some Pull Requests!
Community Leadership
As the Planet is a community service, this new site should be governed by the elected leaders, particularly the Ubuntu Membership Board and Ubuntu Community Council. Folks from these governing bodies will be given rights over the repository and have the ability to add and remove feeds as they wish.
