On the nature of Planets

Posted on Thu 01 July 2010 by alex in geek

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?