Planet MariaDB underwent liberal facelift
Planet MariaDB has been reworked from scratch, getting a new instance with the same look and feel as the rest of mariadb.org.
Three news items, related to that: One bad, one neutral, one good. I’m saving the good one for last, as I hope you will like it.
Bad news: The old Planet had five different RSS feeds, we now have only one. We maintain the format changes only on one RSS feed, which means that some of you will have to update your RSS feed to https://mariadb.org/planet-feed.xml (also listed on Planet MariaDB). That said, we are working on further redirects; atom.xml already is redirecting.
Neutral news: The address of the planet is https://mariadb.org/planet/. You still get there through https://planetmariadb.org; the domain was kindly handed over by Arjen Lentz a short while ago, thx Arjen!
Good news: Planet MariaDB is happy to aggregate any blogs of interest to the MariaDB Server user base. Here, we do have strong feelings: We will be liberal in judging the relevance of individual blogs. Mentioning other databases will not filter out blog entries, as that would defeat the purpose of most blogs. Heck, we prefer going to the other extreme. We don’t even have a requirement on MariaDB being mentioned in every single aggregated blog entry.
This has its downsides. We don’t want to create a spammy blog, with completely out-of-topic entries. How do we avoid a spammy blog? We put the other databases on the whitelist, not the blacklist. An entry which mentions no databases at all is considered out-of-scope for Planet MariaDB.
The whitelist for now is MariaDB, MySQL, Percona. In the spirit of LinuxJedi’s blog Community vs. Ecosystem, we are open to suggestions for further extensions of the list.
We do reserve the right to refine our policy according to the wishes of the readers. The guideline is that we react negatively towards behaviour disrespectful of individual people or products. We may thus block people if we catch violations, or are alerted to them. But we will not mechanically judge the relevance of blog entries, based on requiring them to include the magical character string “MariaDB”. And much less will we disregard them, should they mention the string “MySQL”.
This policy was triggered by Jean-François Gagné alerting us over Zulip, and by the blog posting 23 April 2020 by Shlomi Noach at Pulling this blog out of Planet MySQL aggregator, over community concerns. And by the LinuxJedi blog above.Thanks to J-F, Shlomi and Andrew!
Thank you for being open to suggestions.
> We put the other databases on the whitelist, not the blacklist. An entry which mentions no databases at all is considered out-of-scope for Planet MariaDB.
May I suggest also considering tags? Sometimes I might write a blog post about a query, or about a hack, and might not actually mention “MySQL” or “MariaDB”; however, such post will be tagged with “MySQL”.
I _believe_ on RSS this is indicated by “” element.
We can implement filters per feed, so if a feed is tagged and only includes relevant content, it can have no need for a keyword filter. If a feed includes lots of off-topic content, then a whitelist filter can be applied.
Galera keyword is missing on the whitelist.