Update on Planet for the MySQL Community (June 7, 2020)

Three weeks ago, I released the Pluto Beta of Planet for the MySQL Community.  Since then, a few things changed and I think it is worth doing an update to the Ecosystem.  The change I am the most happy about is that Ivan Groenewold started helping with the project (you can find him in the people of the oursqlcommunity.org GitHub organization).  So Planet for the MySQL Community is not a one-man initiative anymore, and it is growing into being closer to a true community project (we could still use more help, feel free to contact me if you want to join the team, some sysadmin skills required).

I created the Twitter account @PlanetMysqlComT / Planet for the MySQL Community.  I am not sure what I will do with this in the future, but feel free to follow to show interest.  If you have skills in logo creation and if you want to help, it would be good to have a nice "profile picture" for this account.  I also started to use the hashtag #PlanetForTheMysqlCommunity, so feel free to also using it.

One of the things that changed is that I implemented https.  I got an SSL certificate from Zero SSL which was relatively straightforward.  I tried Let's Encrypt, but it was a little more complicated than what I wanted, so I looked for alternatives; Zero SSL was easier, so I did not try harder with Let's Encrypt.  I created the issue Retroactive https implementation for retroactively tracking this change.  So if you are using the old http link, please update to https.

A less visible change was moving the generation of the static pages from a bash script running in a screen to a proper cron job.  This was retroactively tracked in the issue Retroactive cronification.

Some non-MySQL related content was reaching the aggregator via the feeds of the Percona Database Performance Blog and the Percona Community Blog.  I engaged with Percona for improving this, and I was provided with the mysql-and-variants tagged feed for the Performance Blog and with the mysql category feed for the Community Blog.  Thanks to Tom Basil and David Quilty for working with me on this and for providing the Ecosystem with relevant content on Planet for the MySQL Community.  This was tracked in the issue Update Percona feeds to avoid non-relevant content.

I also removed the Planet MySQL and Planet Mar1aDB (always a pain to have to use this trick to have this post indexed by Planet MySQL) feed.  This should solve the issues Duplication of posts and Planet MySQL entry hides the one from the feed of the content-producer, and this was tracked in the issue Remove Planet MySQL and Planet Mar1aDB.  If you see content reaching these two aggregators and not reaching Planet for the MySQL Community, feel free to create a GitHub Issue.

A few feeds were added to Planet for the MySQL Community, the list below:

• MySQL On ARM (added by Ivan),
• Another MySQL DBA,
• The Fellowship Of Data,
• TiDB and TiKV Blog.

If your favorite MySQL Blog is not aggregated, you can create a GitHub Issue (or offer a Pull request), a detailed explanation what is acceptable and how to proceed can be found in the Aggregation and Content Policy (if you do not have a GitHub account, you can also send a mail to the address mentioned in the policy).

And one last thing, I know that the feed of Geeky Hacker is bringing a little too much non-MySQL content.  If you are annoyed by this, feel free to create an issue.  I am keeping it for now to remind myself to implement post filtering (other feeds should be added once we have filtering, they are referred in a GitHub issue related to adding github.blog feed).