The Planet Feed Reader: Better Living Through Gravity

By:

In mid-2003 Jeff Waugh of the GNOME project dropped a link in his weblog sidebar to "Planet GNOME", a webpage containing recent weblog entries made by GNOME contributors. Before long, Planet GNOME had inspired the creation of a slew of Planet webpages for many Free Software development communities. It also turned into its own Python project: the eponymous "Planet" feed reader, available from http://www.planetplanet.org/

Mary's talk will describe the history of the Planet software use throughout the Free Software community. She will also discuss some of the technical details of the Planet software internals: the perennial problem of taking indifferently standards compliant XML input from a variety of sources and turning it into respectable output, together with other technical challenges facing a small but widely used codebase including quality assurance, cross platform support, and resource management.

Stream: Python

Paper: Planet Feed Reader, The

Mary Gardiner is a computing PhD student at Macquarie University, working on computational linguistics. In fairly short past lives, she was a commercial software developer doing web programming and business logic in Python; and a university research assistant working on natural language question answering and information retrieval. Mary has been involved in Free Software communities since 1999. She is a former committee member of the Sydney Linux Users Group, does considerable administrative work for LinuxChix, and founded the ill-fated Sydney Python Users Group. She has written and edited technical documentation for the Twisted project; and contributed to the Planet aggregation software.