"planet.f-droid.org" feed aggregator for android dev related blogs

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Hi!
Many communities host “planets” which aggregate the blogs of community members (see http://planet.fsfe.org or https://planet.jabber.org as examples).
Would there be interest in an fdroid / foss android development related planet? Does such a thing already exist maybe?

Hosting such a planet might help foss android projects to get more visibility and could encourage cooperation. It would also be a place, where free android projects could introduce their applications in more detail than just the fdroid app pages.

What do you think?

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ThisWeekInFDroid kinda fills that, imho

PS. PlanetJabber is on automatic? The StPeter philosophy posts are (fun but) rather odd :slight_smile:

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I think planet.jabber.org is just rather poorly maintained. And yeah, the point of a planet is, that users can register their blog there and the planet automatically shares their posts.

Sure, TWIF is news about apps, but it is written by the fdroid team only.

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If stuff (fdroid users doing stuff) is mentioned @ the mastodon account it will end up it the TWIF.

First of all, is there any content that concentrates on F-Droid? Blogs? Something? Why weren’t they mentioned before? Why don’t they interact?

I feel this should grow out of a need, have said content first, then gather it on the planet, so far I didn’t see it. But then again I can’t see the whole internet.

Care to provide some links?

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I’m not thinking of blogs solely related to FDroid, but more about blogs related to FOSS Android development. Accumulating such blogs might help the FOSS Android movement to grow.

I agree though, that such a thing should grow out of need. As I enjoy reading the above mentioned planets and I’d love have such a thing related to android development, I opened this thread mainly to see, whether there is interest from others as well :slight_smile:

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Sounds like a nice idea to me. I could provide a VM to someone who wants to set it up and run it. As long as there are no objections from others.

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Sounds like a nice idea. Wish it would cover android internals as well…
LineageOS started a 'Lineage Engineering ’ Blog, I think they might have done it. But they haven’t.

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I like this idea. Now it “just” needs someone who has the time to maintain it for the longer term. And to set it up, of course.

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I could look into it, altough I have nearly no experience on administrating VMs.

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Get free experience to put on your resume :wink:

What software do you think you need for a planet site?

You’ll need to come up with some kind of plan. Maybe set up a planet site locally and do a mock-up design.

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I was looking into planet venus, which has support for theming apparently. This is the same software used on the fsfe blog linked in the first post.

I’ll first try to set it up locally in a VM to see, how it goes. I guess all I’ll need is python2 (:confused:). As I understand it, you can then let a webserver point to the output directory and that’s it :slight_smile:

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Great! :grin:

When you’re ready to set it up for real, you should contact @hans about that VM.

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Even better, go serverless! If you make this site using a static site generator, then it can be hosted on gitlab pages, github pages, etc. That will also require the least maintenance. I recommend that approach.

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I just tried out Venus on a Ubuntu VM. Its pretty straight forwards afaict.
The config script takes two directories. One is for caching, the other one is for generated HTML.

Then you just add in some blog URLs and you are good to go. Building the HTML is done by running a python script, which fetches all registered blogs and builds the page.
You can then point your web-server to the output directory.

The documentation recommends to run the script via a cronjob.
Is it possible to have cron-like jobs in gitlab/github pages?

Also I think it would be nice to have a custom FDroid theme, as the default template looks very 2000-ish :smiley:

planet-fdroid
planet-fdroid1797×846 118 KB

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The more I think about this, the more I think it should be run
serverless. That can be done for free on GitLab or GitHub. I’m happy
to help with the gitlab-ci setup. Here’s the quick start:

  • create a new project on gitlab
  • add a README and your Venus config.ini to it
  • then create a file called .gitlab-ci.yml:
image: debian:stretch

pages:
  stage: deploy
  artifacts:
    paths:
      - public
    expire_in: 1w
    when: always
  script:
    - apt-get update
    - apt-get -qy install planet-venus
    - test -d public || mkdir public
    - cd public
    - planet ../config.ini
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Ideally the planet should refresh every 30 mins or so. Is that possible/viable too?

Afaik planet-venus is not available in debians repositories. Instead it has to be cloned via git.

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it is available in Debian, but you can also clone it via git. Just add
apt-get -qy install git before running git clone ....

You can schedule a gitlab ci job to run at least hourly, perhaps every
30 minutes.

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Nice! I’ll give it a shot!

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Alright, it looks like the setup is working. The build is succeeding and artifacts are being generated.

Feel free to take a look :smile:

Now we just need more project blogs :wink:
Also, if someone with more web design experience wants to help polishing the look of the page, feel free to get in contact!

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I thought a little bit about inclusion criteria. This is my proposal (please debate :smiley: )

In order to be added to the planet…

  • the blog owner must agree to the inclusion.
  • the blog must either be about foss + android development only, or a foss + android only category must be provided (eg blog.example.com/category/fossdroid/feed).
  • the blog should preferably be in english.

In order to be included in the planetarium, any planet should:

  • Be somewhat related to free and open technology.
  • Support HTTPS

Some possible candidates I identified are the following blogs:

If you are one of the owners and okay with the inclusion, please let me know :slight_smile: