Planet

See also: Website and Community links

Planet is a stream of the latest the posts from Hackspace related blogs, it can be found at here.

Getting started

If you blog about Hackspace relevant stuff, you’d be most welcome to contribute your feed to Planet Nottinghack. If you already run a blog its RSS feed can be sent to Planet; collecting everyone's latest posts into one place.

It's relatively easy to add your blog; see below.

Setting up a blog

It is easy to set up a blog. For example, Wordpress .com is popular and can be fed into Planet, see wordpress.com.

Also, contributions to the Newsletter are welcome. The wiki can also be used to write about your project, for example Les Plywood and Fire Pong.

Adding your blog

It's relatively easy to add your blog in, but requires a little bit of technical work. If you need help ask the Communications team.

GitHub

Nottinghack's Website github repository contains the list of blogs and code for Planet:

• ../planet/nottinghack/ - contains config file for details of bloggers
• ../public_planet/heads/ - contains the head icons

You will need to fork our website repository on GitHub, make changes, add your image and then issue a pull request back to us. If this sounds complicated, don't worry - it isn't! If you already know how to use github, you can fork the repo and skip to the next section...

Forking

• First, head over to GitHub and make yourself an account.
• Second, visit the website github and click the "Fork" button - this copies the repository into your account.
• You need to get to your area, so click on the octocat icon at the top left. You will see "Your Repositories" on the right of the new page, with your copy of our repo in it. Click on this link.
• We now need to make two changes to the repository:

Add blog image

You need a blog image that is 65 pixels wide, and between about 50 and 90 pixels high. It should also have a transparent background and be saved as a PNG. There are many tutorials on the web to help you do this, and free tools such as [http://www.gimp.org/ GIMP} available. Name it after yourself. Good examples of this image are:

• 
  78 pixels high
• 
  55 pixels high
• 
  73 pixels high

Navigate to public_planet/heads (in your fork of the website) and add your image here. You can do this in browser by clicking the small + next to the path. Make sure your filename doesn't clash with any others.

Add blog to list

Navigate to planet/nottinghack (in your fork of the website) and open the config.ini file. At the bottom of this file add a blank line and then the following code, replacing the parts in

<Angle Brackets>

with your information:

[<Address to your blog's RSS feed>]
name = <Your Name>
face = <filename of your image>
faceheight = <pixel height of your image>

Submit a pull request

Once you have committed all your changes, you need to issue a pull request. From your repository, click on "Pull Requests" on the right, then "Create a Pull Request". You will see a list of all changes you are sending, then click the big green button.

One of the Web Editors will review your request and merge it with the main branch. After that, the Planet updates every 12 hours, so will pull your latest blog post the next time is refreshes.

Notes

Planet is also a generic name for software which aggregates feeds. Hackspace planet is based on web software also called Planet.

See also

• Writing a Blog Post - the main Nottinghack blog