Thu, 01 Apr 2010
Events on Planet Grep
Since its initial incarnation, Planet Grep has carried the feed of FOSDEM, the Open Source event in Belgium.
Since I'm doing this, other people have asked me to carry the feed of their particular open source-event, too. In the past, I've been reluctant to do so, going so far as to consider removing the FOSDEM feed again.
The reason for this is that I want Planet Grep to be a community site; reading Planet Grep should be an easy way to figure out what lives in the Belgian FLOSS community. This becomes harder if it becomes too much of an advertisement site for event organizers rather than a user blog website.
But yesterday, I realized that community-organized events are part of the community, too, and thus it shouldn't be too strange to carry those as well. So I've decided that feeds from event organizers are welcome on Planet Grep, too, provided the event:
- Is a community-event. "Community" is defined as "non-profit, and entrance is free". Sponsorship is okay, but it shouldn't be an event hosted by a particular company to market its newest bit of software, even if it's a piece of software under a FLOSS license.
- Is about FLOSS, and FLOSS alone. Not "we're doing a Database-event, and two of our fifteen speakers are from FLOSS databases".
- Will happen in Belgium. It's okay if it's a travelling event that just happens to be in Belgium for this year, but we won't carry T-DOSE, for example (even if/when that event becomes popular in Belgium).
I've been considering to require that events should be about Open Source in general rather than just about one particular piece of software, but I won't add that restriction for now. I might revisit that bit in the future, however.
As another event that would fit the above set of guidelines, we'll be adding Loadays to Planet Grep shortly.
Thu, 02 Jul 2009
Cleanup: clarification
If I may believe my mailbox and blog comment system, here seems to be some confusion over my cleanup post of a few days ago, so allow me to clarify.
- It is not up to me (or, for that matter, up to anyone but the author) to decide what anyone should write on their blog. However, it is important that the content of Planet Grep remains interesting, and the only way for me to do that is to remove feeds that provide content which, for the most part, is not that interesting for people who read Planet Grep. This is not a personal attack on anyone.
- While I have removed blog feeds that for the most part consisted of nontechnical content, this in no way is meant to imply that people should only send technical content to Planet Grep; on the contrary. This is just a belated follow-up on the results of the survey, where it was clearly indicated that while an occasional nontechnical post is welcomed by most people, this should definitely not be the main topic.
Hope that explains.
Fri, 26 Jun 2009
Planet Grep: feed cleanup
I have just removed some feeds from Planet Grep of people whose content for the most part is non-technical in nature.
As the survey clearly shows, most of the readers of Planet Grep prefer it to be technical for the most part; and I tend to agree.
If I've missed some feeds that should be removed too, feel free to inform me of that fact.
Meanwhile, the people whom I've just removed and whose email address I have have been notified of that fact, and been told that if they provide me with a separate feed that contains only technical articles, they'll be welcome again. This is also true for those of you whose email address I do not have, however.
Here's for hoping that makes certain people happier...
Mon, 04 May 2009
Planet Grep survey: Results
I'll start off with the bad news: surveymonkey sucks. Their free offering does not allow me to export the data, expose it to other people, or do anything useful with it beyond seeing a summary and the individual responses. Of course I can go for a paid option, but they charge $19.99 or some such per month. WTF, you can get dedicated blade hosting for half that price. What I've done is manually copy all the data in a database of my own, so that I could do useful things with it. Next time, I think I'll roll my own survey thing.
Anyway.
The full results (apart from the responses free-form question) are available at my site, and will continue to be updated as more results come in; I'm not closing the survey (though I do not expect more results to change things in an earth-shattering manner anymore). In short, after 53 people had responded, the following can be concluded:
- Most people read Planet Grep on a daily frequency (or higher)
- Planet Grep is mostly read by people who actually post to it, too, though definitely not just those people.
- Regarding the amount of content, for each of 'technical/geeky', 'non-technical', 'number of subscribers', 'number of new posts daily', and 'overall', most people replied 'love it'. However, there are subtle differences; for instance, the 'non-technical' option also saw a significant number of people entering 'too much', while the 'technical/geeky' option had a number of people express that they'd like to see more, in various gradations.
- On the topic of, well, content topics, most people seem to agree that Planet Grep is mostly about 'FLOSS development' and 'Using FLOSS software', whereas 'commercial posts' are not welcomed by most readers. Other topics are less clear; 'Development in general' seems expected as part of Planet Grep by most readers, as is 'Politics around FLOSS', though in a somewhat lesser extent. The opinions about 'Non-FLOSS software' are somewhat balanced, while a small majority frown upon posts on 'Life in general'.
- Regarding selective RSS feeds, most people do not seem to think this is necessary. The clear winner here is that such feeds should only be used for Planet Grep 'if the amount of off-topic content would be too high otherwise'.
- Finally, I'm happy to report that most people seem happy about Planet Grep; over 60% of respondents feels that Planet Grep is 'okay, though it could be improved in some areas', the second option which people could choose.
Finally, I also received 17 responses in the final free-form question. Most of these were either thanks or clarifications of earlier questions (or both), which were welcome, but did not otherwise add new information. Two, however, did add new information:
The first was a suggestion to add Tom Bayens to Planet Grep (which I've since done), along with other not further qualified 'influential Belgians in software development'. I'd like to use this opportunity to reiterate the fact that suggestions of blogs are always welcome, either to me or to Kris; if they fit the profile, they'll be added without hesitation. We can't be expected to know each and every Belgian FLOSS person, obviously, so if you think there's someone who belongs on Planet Grep, then please let us know!
The second was a sentiment that 'twitter(-like)' posts do not belong on Planet Grep. I tend to agree with that; Planet Grep is supposed to be a good read, not a statement of what people are doing at a particular point of time, which fits 'regular' blogs more than it fits microblogging.
So there, that's that. I'll be contacting a few people over the next few days and/or weeks, so that I can work out an arrangement which better suits how the Planet Grep readership prefers to see things; but other than that, not much is going to change.
Tue, 28 Apr 2009
Planet Grep: Survey
Planet Grep has been running for quite a while now. What started out as 'me playing with some random software' is now a rather popular website, read daily by many, many people, generating somewhere between 5 and 7 gigabytes of data each month. For a website that consists of a single page of (on average) less than half a meg, that's quite some traffic.
Originally, I just threw a bunch of blogs written by people whom I knew as being part of the Belgian FLOSS community in the config, and we kindof grew from there. That worked, but as Planet Grep grew, there have been a few times when I felt bad about some of the choices I'd made in the past.
Since I feel that a website whose content is written by a large community should not be in the hands of just one man (me), I already added Kris to the subversion ACL, so that he'd be able to add or remove people too.
But there's more that can be done, so today I wrote a little survey about Planet Grep. Its aim is to help me understand what people would like to see in Planet Grep, and perhaps tune the subscriber list based on that a bit. The results will be used to update the about pages.
As such, I'd appreciate it if people would fill out this survey. It's not going to take more than a few minutes (there's, like, only two pages).
Thanks!
Fri, 07 Mar 2008
Planet.grep.be: about
I created an 'about' page over on planet.grep.be, which, apart from listing who's behind Planet Grep, also outlines the guidelines I've been following in (not) allowing people on Planet Grep.
In case anyone is interested...
Update: now with actually working link. Whee.
Tue, 31 Jul 2007
Incomplete descriptions?
I've been removing and blocking blogs on Planet Grep that don't contain their complete articles in their RSS feed, because I feel that a planet should read as a newspaper; having only teasers to follow makes that problematic. I find that having to open a different website each time you get to a different article distracts you from actually reading the blog entries on the planet, which isn't very nice; and since the RSS feed can contain the entire article, why not?
However, it appears that a number of people disagree with that opinion, so I'm hereby requesting opionions.
If you feel that Planet Grep should continue to contain only feeds with full articles (as opposed to feeds with a "read more" type of link), please leave a comment on this article in my blog.
Likewise, if you feel that Planet Grep should not try to be holier than thou and that more people on planet is more important than being able to read an article in its entirety on the planet, then please leave a comment on this article in my blog.
Thanks,
Wed, 29 Nov 2006
Planet Grep mirrorred
Yes, Kris: everything is a fscking^W, eh, Funky DNS problem. Or, well, at least, every problem can be solved by use of some smart DNS tricks.
Planet Grep is now mirrorred on Christophe Vandeplas' server, and both servers are now published in DNS for planet.grep.be; so, next time our link goes down (hopefully never), at least Planet Grep will not cease to exist. Isn't that wonderful?
Fri, 03 Nov 2006
One year of Planet Grep.
Well—almost, anyway. Planet Grep was launched on the 28th of November, 2005, at which date it managed to collect an astonishing 117 hits, for a total of 9,23M. At least that's what my awstats pages say (they're on samba.grep.be, but don't bother trying to read them—you need a Kerberos account in the GREP.BE realm to do so). I guess I should wait 'till the end of the month before posting a post such as this one, but I got interested due to the poking of one particular individual who would fit the target personae of Planet Grep had he had a blog.
It might be nice to try and figure out whether it's been a popular year. And I would say that this is the case: the next month, it surpassed the bandwidth usage of my regular site at grep.be, and by the end of January, it had almost double that amount (789M for Planet Grep vs 372MB for grep.be).
Pretty quick start, that.
These days, bandwidth usage has risen to a good 2G of bandwidth each month (on average), where it has stagnated (the peak was in june at 2,33G). That's about 55M per day, on average. Not bad for a simple business ADSL line.
Contrary to what I'd expected, the site is most popular on wednesdays (59M, or 646 pages on average), rather than in weekends. In fact, weekends sees the lowest number of hits (even if it still reaches a good 50M). But that's easily explained if we look at the hours during which Planet Grep is most often consulted: most of you seem to take a quick peek at this page just after lunch break (between 14:00 and 15:00). Shouldn't you be working, no?
Ah well. It might also be interesting to note that most of you use an RSS reader. 132039 hits were to /rss20.xml, 31297 were to /rss10.xml, and only 18594 hits were to the main page.
Which is probably the reason why 73.4 % of you use an unknown browser, and 56.1 % an unknown operating system. But at least Firefox and Linux occupy a good second place on both lists, which is what I care most about.
Let's see what happens a year from now, shall we?
Tue, 10 Oct 2006
Disk not full anymore
In case you visited planet grep earlier today, you may have noticed something peculiar: the front page being corrupted, or truncated, or not there at all. This had everything to do with a full hard disk in samba.grep.be, the machine that serves Planet Grep. I temporarily shut down the apache process and modified some configuration items so that some caching bits do not use quite as much space as they used to anymore, and we're now back at approximately 10G of free disk space. So we're good for the go again.
Since the planet cache also had gotten corrupted during all this, I nuked it. This revealed that the ISOC people's feed had not been refreshed since quite a while, and that they use an incomplete. As a result, in accordance with my policy, I removed its feed. Also, yesterday the feed for the FOSDEM website has been added—but that only got active today, because of the disk space issues. Oh well.
Some mail is welcome in /dev/null. Real mail, however, is welcome at my email address
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