Planet installations
Funny how technical people always seem to search for technical solutions to social problems.
"Some people think there's too much content on Planet Debian. Let's create another Planet with less content, that will solve the issue"
Allow me to just say: "Hah"
Planet Debian is a website with a lot of content. If you read such a site, inevitably there's going to be some content you're not going to like. This is a fact of life. Reducing that content so that it no longer carries the content you personally don't like might solve the issue for you, but there's no guarantee that it will also solve the issue for everyone else. For instance, I know I don't generally like Russel's writing style, but I don't assume that's the case for everyone else. It would be silly for me to request his removal from Planet Debian for that reason alone.
If there's stuff on Planet Debian you don't like, then just don't read it. That's easy enough... and if it isn't, fix that!
Wouter,
What you're saying just doesn't hold for me. I have actively been following 2 planets (Planet Gnome and Planet Debian) for the last couple of years, and more recently some other planets too (like Planet Grep ;)).
I follow Planet Gnome and Planet Debian in the first place because I want to keep on top of advancements in the technologies of these communities (hrrrm, this is poorly expressed, but I guess you know what I mean).
Something that has occurred on several occasions is the following situation: I read something on one of these planets, and think: "Hey, this is interesting! I need to get back to this later.". Then for some reason, whatever it may be (be it work, or something else), I open another page, and the planet page gets put in the background. After a while either my browser or my laptop crashes (for example when I forget to plug in the power), and when I reopen the planet page, the post I was interested in has "scrolled" off the planet and is nowhere to be found anymore. This really blew out of proportion during the last SOC for Planet Gnome, to the extent that posts didn't stay on there for much longer than half a day, sometimes even less. Planet Gnome does not have search functionality, and Planet Debian has only acquired this functionality recently. I have "lost" a lot of valuable content this way. How do you suggest "ignoring content you don't like" solves this? Because it doesn't. I realize this is largely my own fault (I could bookmark those links, or use an RSS reader - but RSS readers are a different story altogether, which I need to gripe about some other time), but I can't imagine other people not having had the same issues. For me the issue is not about not liking some peoples content (and there are people whose content I do not like, and which I have "eliminated" from my "view" (there's a trick with overriding CSS you can do on Planet Gnome). This only solves the problem of me not having to read their BS though), but about a more practical issue which can be (at least partially) solved be effectively not including some feeds on the planet, instead of ignoring/hiding them.
Jan
Strangely people seep coming up with straw-man ideas about large numbers of Planets. The fact is that the Ubuntu model of having two Planets worked well for them, it seemed to be well accepted when I implemented it for my "Other Planet Linux.conf.au", and I'm pretty sure that it would work well for Planet Debian.
I expect that the incidence of you not liking my non-technical posts is significantly greater than you not liking my technical posts. So being able to get the posts of mine which interest you would be a benefit for you too.