I upgraded my WordPress install yesterday which inadvertently broke the ‘emacs’ tagged feed to Planet Emacsen. The aim of having a sub-feed from my blog was so I didn’t pollute the planet feed with my rambling life story which is probably of more interest(?) to my friends and family. They tend to read the other syndicated feed on LiveJournal which has no filtering and as a result often generates confusion from my less technically inclined friends when I start talking about esoteric editor features.
However one of my non emacs related posts did generate a number of useful replies pointing me towards the useful autossh tool. This made me wonder if sticking to purely emacs related posts was being a little too limiting. I’d be interested in hearing from Planet Emacsen subscribers what they actually expect from the feed? I’ll assume non-techie posts should be off limits but is there value in reading technical posts by emacs users that are not actually related to emacs? Or do people prefer the planet feed to be all about our favourite editor and the things we can do with it? Are we just a community of like-minded individuals with a penchant for octipedal key-strokes?
I’d be happy to see non-Emacs posts in a separate feed, and have that feed promoted on the web site, but I wouldn’t want to see them in the main Planet Emacsen feed (we already get a few of these as it is, when various bloggers go off-topic). Any non-Emacs posts are bound to be very interesting to a sub-set of readers, but slightly annoying to the rest, so let’s try to minimise this?
I disagree with Phil. One of the things I enjoy about Planet Gnome and Fedora People is getting to see the other things that the people involved with Gnome and Fedora get up to. It makes it feel more like a community of people with a shared interest rather than a channel for articles about that interest. Non-techie posts would probably be pushing it too far, though.
I completely agree with Phil. I subscribed to Planet Emacs in order to get posts about Emacs and am occasionally annoyed by flicker pictures and non-emacs related posts.
That is the second reason I made the better planet emacs pipe. So I could remove flicker posts and posts that don’t mention emacs. The primary reason, of course, was to add my own emacs-related blog back in.
Unfortunately, there are a couple of drawbacks:
The first, is that I can’t figure out how to remove my own non-emacs related posts (I can’t, honest!)
The second is that I haven’t managed to exclude the emacs check from the post title, so the Got Emacs? posts always come through, emacs related or not. Fortunately, they are mostly emacs related.
Solutions to either or both of these problems would be welcome.
Your first problem is easily solved. Just submit a feed of your emacs tagged posts, i.e.:
http://curiousprogrammer.wordpress.com/tag/emacs/feed/
I’d also rather get ‘Emacs pure’ from the Planet Emacs feed. If I’m keen on a post and want to comment, I’ll visit that blog, where I may discover all manner of shared interests, but in the feedreader where I view PlanetE, I want just the goods I came for. Thanks for asking.
Some blog entries are written so tersely by their authors that they fail to mention the word “Emacs”, even though they are talking about some feature or package that is for Emacs!
As long as an “off-topic” post to the planet is *short*, I don’t mind it. I predict the same community expectations in the Emacs IRC channel apply — celebrate off-topicalitiness.