Blogging in the wind

Panel about Blogs in Spain on Feb 1st

As Loïc Le Meur tells in his blog, on Feb 1st at 6 PM in Instituto de Empresa (Madrid)  there will be a panel about blogs in Spain and Europe. At this moment, the list of attendants is: Loic himself, Enrique Dans, Julio Alonso, Octavio Rojas, Juan Varela, Alberto Knapp and myself. If you are interested and want to join, add your name in the wiki page of the panel (a wiki is an easily editable page).

Planeta Spanglish

Julio Alonso did the scoop (and Loïc spread the news): Planeta Spanglish is on.

«Starting with a post on eCuaderno, a few email messages were exchanged and Víctor  has created a Spanish Speaking Bloggers Blogging in English Planet (SSBBEP, cool!), with its corresponding XML feed. [...] The idea is to create a bridge between the Spanish speaking and the English speaking blogging communities and to make it possible for ideas and memes generated in the Spanish speaking blogosphere to reach a wider audience. The tool still needs some sharpening, but the idea has merit».

The planet (a public site aggregating posts from different blogs) is run by a TypePad blog as the front-end and Planet Express as the backend. The site, of course, still needs work specially in design and presentation, but I set it up in a couple of minutes. Hope it can serve as valuable source of news and opinion. If you want to be added, drop me a comment.

Tag algebra

Technorati tags has received a huge amount of coverage in the weblog Universe. The idea is simple and powerful: let bloggers categorize their content and let's Technorati aggregate their posts. So now, Technorati uses feed categories and <a href rel="tag">keywords</a> to index posts using tags. You can see the results of searching tag:python.

So yesterday, in #joiito we have a discussion about tag algebra, summarized in Climb to the Stars:

«So, there is “blog“. And “weblog“. And “blogs“. And “weblogs“. How about a way to get the posts/photos/links tagged with any of these tags? Maybe something like .../blog,blogs,weblog,weblogs/ [...] Del.icio.us does this already! I’ve updated my tags and lists. See “books+read” for books I’ve read, and “films+seen” for films I’ve seen. I’m a happy bunny!»

The proposal is to add a standard way to do tag algebra in URL, specially union and (less important) complements. If this tries to be compatible among makers, del.icio.us imposes some restrictions: it does does intersection using "+" operator and doesn't allow spaces in keywords, but it allows "_" and "-" characters.

Planet Express 0.1

I've released the first version of Planet Express, a Python script that uses a blog as the public interface for the feed aggregator. Planets are public feed aggregators. For example, you can read Planet Movable Type or Planet Python. The mother of all planets is Planet, a Python script that read a list of feeds and uses templates to generate the front page of the planet. However, I think that using a blog for the front page is more efficient while taking advantage of a full featured CMS's like Movable Type, Blogger or TypePad. Right now, I'm testing the 0.1 release (source code available in BSD license) in Planeta Canarias.

It requires requires Python 2.1. It uses Universal Feed Parser (Mark Pilgrim) and OPML Paser (David Janes). Planet Express reads an OPML file containing a list of feeds. Then, it reads each feed and extracts the new entries. Finally, it publishes the new entries in a blog using metaWeblog API. For each entry, Planet Express saves a unique identifier in express.hsh. This file is readed when parsing new entries to avoid re-publications. Entry titles in the aggregator blog use the format

  <blog URL>blog title</blog URL>: <post URL>post Title</post URL>

Blog's URL and title are taken from OPML feed file (htmlUrl and title attributes of outline element).

The remote publishing configuration is stored in express.cfg file, which has the following format:

[Remote API]
method=metaweblog
point=http://www.typepad.com/t/api
appkey=
username=myuser
password=mypassword
blogid=771313
opml=myfeeds.opml

You will find more information in README and INSTALL files, in the released package. Suggestions welcome.

Similar software is Ben Hammersley's Crossposter for MT and Morbus' MyRSSMerger, the two of then programmed in Perl. Planet Express' initial implementation was done in Perl, but some of the CPAN modules I used had troubles dealing with feed encoding (some Spanish feeds use ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15 and other ones, UTF-8). Pilgrim's Feed Parser is a kick ass library and support both RSS (and its many versions) and Atom.