Nascent

Planet Nature

Planet Nature is an aggregator of all the NPG blogs that post original content. It’s powered by Venus, an actively developed branch of the Planet software.

Venus uses a feed parser to standardise all the feeds into Atom, then XSL templates to transform those feeds into XHTML, Atom, OPML, FOAF and whatever else is needed.

Thanks to Sam Ruby, Venus now supports CSV files as input for the list of subscriptions to aggregate. This means that we can use Google Spreadsheets to collaboratively maintain the list of subscriptions, giving editing permission to whoever needs to be able to edit the list.

With the addition of an extra XSL template, Venus can also produce a simple HTML file listing just the subscriptions. Google can then use that file to produce a Custom Search Engine on the fly, with searches limited to sites linked from the original page. You can see this in the sidebar on Planet Nature.

Also in the sidebar is a Filter based on Yahoo! Pipes. This pipe takes all of the feeds aggregated by Planet Nature and searches them for the given keywords, creating an RSS or JSON feed that you can use to be notified when new entries are posted to NPG blogs matching your chosen keywords.

Comments

Comments are closed.