About Planet Lisp

by Zach Beane

Planet Lisp is an aggregation of weblog entries from various sources. It's inspired by (and steals the layout of) Planet Gnome. It uses a combination of custom Lisp software and Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser 4.

How are weblogs selected? There are two criteria:

• my whim
• occasional Common Lisp content

That's about it. I don't expect the aggregated items to always be about Lisp, although if Lisp content drops to zero over a long enough time, the feed will be dropped.

If you have any questions or comments about Planet Lisp, please email me.

Syndication

Planet Lisp's content is offered as an RSS feed. You can use dedicated syndication software to poll it for updates, or you can use one of these service:

• My Yahoo! (you can add Planet Lisp automatically by clicking here)
• BlogLines
• LiveJournal

Here is an entry point to the Planet Lisp archives.

Adding your blog

Planet Lisp's software understands a variety of syndication formats, such as RSS 2.0, RSS 0.91, and Atom 1.0. However, RSS is so underspecified, oops, I mean flexible, that there are many valid forms of RSS that do not make very good feeds for Planet Lisp. Here are a few ways to produce a feed that Planet Lisp can happily consume.

• Use Atom 1.0. The tools that produce Atom are, in general, less capricious and flaky than the tools that produce RSS

But, if you can't do that:

• Use RSS 2.0
• Make sure the a date element, such as pubDate or dc:date, is present in each item
• Use meaningful and unique guid elements, and have their values be permalinks
• Include the full contents of your entries, not just excerpts. It's no fun to read: "Today I was working on a really cool program. It ..."