Over the last few years I’ve written a few times about how I’ve been building planets. A planet is a web site which aggregates web feeds on a particular topic and republishes them as a combined web site (almost certainly with a combined web feed as well). One of my earliest planets was Planet Balham which combines feeds about Balham, the area of London where I live.
The idea of using the internet to bring together local communities has been gaining a lot of traction recently, so I’ve been doing a bit of work on Planet Balham firstly to improve the design and secondly to make the content as interesting as possible. I’ve also promoting it a bit and, as a result of that work, someone suggested to me earlier today that a Planet Streatham might also be useful. For those of you who don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of London geography I should probably point out that Streatham is the area to the east of Balham.
I have a pretty good system in place for building planets quickly so in my lunch break I threw together a quick prototype for Planet Streatham. And then (because I was on a roll) I did Planet Tooting and Planet Clapham too.
Of course, the problem with building planets is finding good content. For Balham, I have some local knowledge and I’m pretty happy with what I have[1]. For Streatham, Tooting and Clapham I have less local knowledge and, to be honest, less inclination to research the subject. But I’ve discovered that you can actually build a decent local planet with just a few standard feeds. And those are what I’ve used for the new planets. I think these would be a good start for any local planet. The great thing about them is that it’s easy to customise them for any other location.
- BBC Weather
http://news.bbc.co.uk/weather/forecast/4292/Next3DaysRSS.rss?area=Clapham - Flickr Photo Search
http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=clapham&format=atom - Delicious Search
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/clapham - Google News Search
http://news.google.com/news?q=clapham&output=atom - Technorati Search
http://feeds.technorati.com/search/clapham - Twitter Search
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=clapham
In all cases, I hope it’s obvious how to customise the link.
Automated searches aren’t without their problem, of course. Since I’ve been following Google’s news search for “Balham”, I’ve learned more than I really wanted to about Nebraskan basketball player Chris Balham. But that’s only to be expected and the “real” results far outweigh the problems. Initial results indicate that the problem might be worse for Planet Tooting. Tuning the search terms – perhaps to include “London” – might be an improvement.
So I have basic planets for Streatham, Tooting and Clapham. I don’t intend to spread my empire any further. But I’d really like to see more local planets like this springing up. I’ve already had a couple of people contact me on Twitter about creating others. There’s already a Planet SE16, but there’s no reason why every part of London shouldn’t have one.
The technology isn’t hard. My planets are built with my own software, but I expect pretty much any language will have some kind of planet application available. I’ll write in more detail later this week about how I’ve built mine, but if I’ve inspired you to build one, please let me know and I’ll start some kind of directory.
[1] Still interested in adding more though, let me know if you know of a good local feed that I’m missing.
Less than an hour to install the module and all dependencies and set up:http://whitby.pint.org.uk/ and http://sheffield.pint.org.uk/Ok so they need a little bit of design work.
interesting, and your software on what is written? Perl? You are considered open CMS (like Joomla) as the basis for your problem?