Planet Fedora, the voice of the community

Across the Linux and Fedora communities, there are several members of various communities that write and maintain their own blogs across all four corners of the world. With that being said, both of these communities are large and sometimes it’s a challenge to keep track of an individual contributor’s blog versus all of the other noise on the Internet. How can one expect to keep up with what’s going on in the world of Fedora and the greater Linux community? Fortunately, the Fedora Project offers a solution to this problem: Fedora Planet!

What is Fedora Planet?

Fedora Planet is a blog aggregator service available to contributors within the Fedora Project community. Using categories or tags on their own blogs, contributors can “link” their blog into Fedora Planet to have any posts they publish with the matching category or tag also appear on the Fedora Planet website.

The benefits of Fedora Planet is that it provides a quick and easy way to read through individual blog articles written by various members of the Fedora and Linux communities. In other words, it’s a good way to “check the pulse” of what’s happening across the world of free and open-source software.

Who publishes to the Planet?

Anyone who is a member of a Fedora Account System (FAS) group excluding the Contributor License Agreement groups is able to publish their blog to Fedora Planet. In order to link a blog to the Planet, a contributor can log into their fedorapeople.org space and add a small configuration file for their blog.

There are various people who publish to their blogs to Fedora Planet beyond Fedora just by itself. Frequent examples of articles on the Planet might include a technical how-to about mounting filesystems, a write-up about some of the latest software available in Fedora, the thoughts and opinions of a Linux kernel developer, a story about building team relationships in open-source communities, and more.

Why is it different from the Magazine?

The Fedora Magazine and Fedora Planet are two separate publications. While the Magazine focuses on creating carefully-crafted content with a specific objective in mind, Fedora Planet is much looser and can be more personal the Magazine. The Planet is a place for expression of many ideas. Not every idea needs to be promotional; some ideas may be controversial or critical, or evoke other mental or emotional responses. However, all posts to the Planet should reflect our commitment as a community to be excellent to each other.

How can I add my blog to the Planet?

Before you join the Fedora Planet, it is important to understand the few requirements of what is appropriate to post there. After reading this, the first step will be to make sure you have an account in the Fedora Account System (FAS). In addition to signing the contributor agreement, you also have to be a member of one additional group – this can include but is not limited to a kernel development group, a desktop spin special interest group, and hundreds more.

After doing this, you will have access to your Fedora People space to add the information about your blog to the Planet. Start by logging in to your fedorapeople.org account. You must be using the SSH key that you uploaded into the FAS, and your userspace is created the first time you log in:

ssh accountname@fedorapeople.org

Next, set up a category- or tag-specific feed for your blog that will be used to publish content relevant to Fedora Planet. Please use a category, label, or tag on your personal blog rather feed your entire blog to the Planet. This allows you o mark posts that are interesting for the Fedora community. For specific information about creating category-specific feeds, you can see the documentation for WordPress, Blogger, Blogspot, or Tumblr.

Now create a file named .planet in the root of your home directory on fedorapeople.org. The contents of the file follow the pattern below. In the brackets [], use the URL for the category specific feed from the previous step.

[http://yourname.wordpress.com/tag/fedora/feed/]
name = Your Name
face = http://yourname.fedorapeople.org/yourpicture.png

The first line in brackets is the URL of your category specific RSS/RSS2/Atom feed, not your blog’s URL. The next line is your name as you want it to appear on the Planet. The final line is optional and is the complete URL to your hackergotchi or personal icon. There should be no spaces or tabs preceding ANY of the above lines in your .planet file. You can have more than one entry in your .planet file – just add another one in the same format.

After completing this step, your blog will be added to the Fedora Planet within the next 24 hours. For your next publication, use the category or tag for your blog and watch as it appears on the homepage of fedoraplanet.org! Before you know it, you too can join the ranks of those who publish articles to Fedora Planet as well.