Musings

Venus

As the eagle-eyed among you may already have noticed, Planet Musings is now powered by Sam Ruby’s Venus. What Sam achieved with Planet was nothing short of amazing. One could take a dog’s breakfast¹ of syndication feeds as input and produce unfailingly well-formed XHTML(+MathML) output.

Venus is a rewrite (the second planet …), with better performance and a host of new features, like themes and filters (which can be applied on a per feed basis).

I’ve already started to use some of these new features to clean up Planet Musings. More will follow as the Venus code stabilizes. [As of this writing, there’s a nasty bug, which is leaving Planet Musings in a rather ugly state. Fixed.]

Perhaps one of the coolest things is Sam’s determination to make this a community effort. After I emailed him a few patches and suggestions, he cajoled me into setting up my own branch of Venus, where I could commit whatever changes I wanted, and he could pick them up at his leisure.