intertwingly

It’s just data

Planet Server


I’ve committed a initial, and somewhat rough, version of a Planet HTTP Server into my Planet repository.  To use, simply run planet.py as you normally do, but add a -s option.  The server will listen a port that you can configure, with the default being 5335 (a popular port supported by some of the auto-subscription services).

If you then point your web server at http://localhost:5335/feed/, you will see the normal “fancy” Planet template, with your feeds on the right and a large blank space on the left.

Picture some introduction and welcoming text there.  As well as one or more input boxes that allow you to subscribe to a feed or import from OPML™.

Now, click on a feed.  The left hand side now fills with content - but only from that feed.  Imagine an unsubscribe button at the top, along with perhaps a few others, like refresh.

None of this requires much code.  Python’s ConfigParser already has a write method.

And the only substantive change to Planet was to make the gather_channel_info and gather_items_info methods separately callable.

If you specify --verbose option when invoking planet, the http://localhost:5335/debug portion of the URI namespace which will allow you to view selected objects.  server-debug.py is actually reloaded every request, and I used that to develop much of this functionality - moving the results to the server when done.

Other todo’s are authentication and resolving how to deal with socket timeouts in a server context.