Welcome to part 2 of my all-inclusive planet tutorial, to help you make the most of your RSS feeds etc. Part One looked at how you would go about installing Planet, and testing to see whether or not it works... Now that you've done that, you need to learn how to set up your own RSS Aggregation, that is why we have part two, so without any further ado,
Noogz' All-Inclusive Planet Tutorial, Part 2: Making your first planet-enabled page!
So now that you have planet installed on your web server, use your favourite FTP/SSH Visualisation client to navigate to the directory where you installed Planet, and make a copy of the "examples" directory and give it an arbitrary name that will allow you to remember it easily. Now that that's done, you can enter this copied directory, and edit the "config.ini" file. This is where Planet gets its instructions to put the page together, so if you don't fill it out, your planet isn't going to look too good...
The config.ini file is more-or-less self-explanatory, so I'll only skim over the options and how you should set them. The first section is labelled [Planet], and as the comments say: "Every planet needs a [Planet] section", as this is where Planet gets the master configuration from.
The first option is the "Name" one - this is the name you are giving your planet page. If you are doing an aggregation of many feeds, then it is customary to call the page "Planet [Your site's name]", however, if it's just for your own blog (as a syndication), then it's best just to name it after your blog. The "Link" option should be the exact address of this Aggregation. Owner_name and Owner_email should correspond too your own name/address.
The Log_level option should be set to "Debug" until you have thoroughly tested the aggregation. Then you may change it to "Warning".
The template_files option is by far the most important of this section - it's the section that describes which template files should be output by Planet. This should be an HTML file and an RSS1.0 feed at the least. These can point to files in examples/ but you will need to ensure that there are no files that share the same filename up to the .tmpl in the output directory, as Planet will overwrite all files it finds. The output_dir should be an absolute location, and preferably available from the greater web (otherwise people can't read your page :)). Items_per_page and Days_per_page should specify the maximum number of items per page, so you can specify how long your pages are. You can overwrite any of those values by specifying a section titled with [template name].
Well... You've almost finished. Now all you need to do is specify your RSS feeds. Just put the address of the feed into [Square Brackets]. You can specify options such as [Name], which describes the name of that feed. You may also want to define the offset, in case your feed does not display at GMT.
Now, from your SSH client, issue the ./planet.py ./your-planet/config.ini command, and with any luck, you will have a planet pop up where you specified in your directory.
You will notice that you need to run Planet whenever you want to update your feeds. I'll teach you how to do this with Cron in Part 3, along with many other things. See you then!
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