PlanetPlanet++

I have to admit that I have not really made friends with Python as a web scripting language. I use it for network, system, and database scripting, and I’ve done some web services stuff with it, but I haven’t been able to use it for things that have, say, a browser interface. Until the other night.

I got email that this guy who maintained a site was going to shut it down. This really annoyed me. Then I remembered that a new web host I’m using actually supports Python. Sure, it’s a really old, crusty version of Python, but Python nonetheless. The site being shut down was running ‘PlanetPlanet’, which is a feed aggregator website package. You tell it the url’s for all of the feeds that interest you, and it goes and grabs all of that content from the various feeds, formats it, and spits back something that looks pretty nice.

PlanetPlanet needs no database, and no Apache modules. I unzipped it, configured it, fed it the feed url’s, went to the site, and I was live. I got it running in under 10 minutes, and had templates in place and security accounted for in another 10 minutes. Very nice!!