Ubuntu Wiki

To add your feed to Planet Ubuntu, you must be an Ubuntu Member¹, and your ssh key must be included in your Launchpad account information.

Subscribed feeds ought to be at least occasionally relevant to Ubuntu, although the only hard and fast rule is "don't annoy people."

Separating content

You may want to tag or label individual posts or categorize only some posts to be aggregated in Ubuntu Planet. Different blogging software have different ways of providing feeds that will only aggregate posts you mark or tag under an "ubuntu-planet" category, for example.

• In Blogger: the feed URL for a specific label would be http://xxx.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname

• In WordPress: You can provide feeds to only specific categories on your site by adding the following to the end of the feed URL link: http://example.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=42 or http://example.com/category/categoryname/feed . Also see: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds

  • WordPress.com users: RSS2 feeds have a small problem, so you need to use your Atom feed (http://username.wordpress.com/feed/atom) or add ?mrss=off to the end of the RSS2 feed. Example http://blog.site.com/category/ubuntu/feed/?mrss=off

  • WordPress 2.7 users: RSS2 feeds for a specific category doesn't work with the example feed link above when Permalink's set to Default. Use http://example.com/?cat=4&feed=rss2 instead. See forum discussion for details.

• In Drupal: you can use taxonomies to tag your content and have RSS feeds generated from those taxonomies. See this blog post under "Taxonomy Generated Feeds" for more information.

• In LiveJournal: the feed URL for a specific tag would be http://example.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=foobar

• In Habari: the feed URL for a specific tag would be http://example.com/tag/foobar/atom

• For Tumblr and others with no filtering support: You can use Yahoo Pipes to filter your feed, but the link to your blog in the right Planet Ubuntu sidebar will point to the feed also.

Adding Your Feed

You first need to add an SSH public key to your launchpad account, if you haven't done so already. If your launchpad username is yourusername, then you would go to:

https://launchpad.net/~yourusername/+editsshkeys

Then to add your feed, first install the "bzr" and "paramiko" packages if you haven't done so already:

$sudo apt-get install bzr python-paramiko

Next, check out the configuration files from the launchpad bzr tree.

$ bzr launchpad-login yourusername
$ bzr checkout lp:~planet-ubuntu/config/main planet-ubuntu
$ cd planet-ubuntu/

If you don't have the host key for bazaar.launchpad.net, initial checkout will ask you to authenticate. The RSA key fingerprint for this host is: 9d:38:3a:63:b1:d5:6f:c4:44:67:53:49:2e:ee:fc:89

If this checkout fails with a "No branch found" message, it is likely that you are not listed as an Ubuntu Member. Read more about how the new member process works. If the checkout fails with a Permission denied error, it is likely that your SSH key isn't in Launchpad, or that you have your username wrong.

Next, place your hackergotchi² into the heads/ subdirectory:

$ cp ~/hackergotchi.png heads/yourusername.png
$ bzr add heads/yourusername.png

If you don't have a hackergotchi to add right away, comment out the line (using # at the beginning) or leave the entire line out.

Once you've done that, add a stanza like the following to the end of the config.ini file:

[http://blog.example.com/~yourusername/feed?category=ubuntu-only]
name = Your Name Here
face = yourusername.png
nick = yourusername

Please use your real name at least somewhere in the 'name' field.

When you are satisfied that your entry is correct, it's time to check in your changes:

$ bzr diff
$ bzr commit -m "Added yourusername to Planet Ubuntu"

Please note that Planet runs from cron, and it relies on the work of some periodic events on the Launchpad server. Your changes could take up to two hours to take effect.

Conditions

We reserve the right to remove any feed that is inaccessible, flooding the page, or otherwise interfering with the operation of the Planet. We also have the right to move clearly offensive content or content that could trigger legal action.