Planet feed does not have variety

[iandunn]

​planet.w.org feeds the news in Core's Events & News dashboard widget.

Right now it subscribes to a lot of early contributors who don't publish often, and some who are no longer active in the project.

Most of the remaining sites don't publish often either. The only ones that do are the Tavern and HeroPress, with the Tavern dominating the majority of the items in the feed.

What are some ways to solve that?

IIRC, changes to the feed need Matt's sign-off.

[iandunn]

I think the simplest way would be to add more sites to the feed. The authors would need to be highly trusted and responsible. If anyone has suggestions, please add them.

If that isn't enough, another idea would be to open a Core ticket to discuss changing the Widget's display logic. Sites could be limited to 1-2 items in the widget, rather than being able to take up all 3 spots. (The first of the 4 spots is always dedicated to official w.org/news posts)

[sippis]

Sharing my quick two cents.

In my opinion, new personal blogs shouldn't be added and existing ones should be (at least mainly) removed. The widget name is "News & Events", not "News, Events & Personal opinions".

Few feeds to add:

• central.wordcamp.org/feed
• wordpressfoundation.org/feed
• wpandup.org/feed
• gutenbergtimes.com/feed

[sippis]

Replying to iandunn:

I think the simplest way would be to add more sites to the feed. The authors would need to be highly trusted and responsible. If anyone has suggestions, please add them.

If that isn't enough, another idea would be to open a Core ticket to discuss changing the Widget's display logic. Sites could be limited to 1-2 items in the widget, rather than being able to take up all 3 spots. (The first of the 4 spots is always dedicated to official w.org/news posts)

Giving that Tavern publishes currently 1-3 new articles almost daily, limiting how many spots each site do get sounds reasonable. Regardless how much new sources would be added, Tavern will supersede articles from those other sources quite quickly.

[greenshady]

Replying to iandunn:

I think the simplest way would be to add more sites to the feed. The authors would need to be highly trusted and responsible. If anyone has suggestions, please add them.

Post Status falls under the umbrella of quality journalism in the WordPress space. I'm not sure if the commercial nature of the site would prohibit its inclusion. If not, that is my one recommendation.

[Otto42]

Proposing any relevant feeds to Matt would be the way to get them included.

[iandunn]

Replying to greenshady:

Post Status falls under the umbrella of quality journalism in the WordPress space.

+1. ​They're already in the feed, but only ​the `planet` category, which doesn't appear to be used frequently.

[iandunn]

@hlashbrooke was talking to Matt about this, and he's going to add a few of the ones suggested above.

Matt also had the idea of being able to add individual posts from any site, without having to add the site's entire feed. I put together a quick version of that yesterday, and am going to test it out on make.w.org/test.

[iandunn]

In 10289:

Reblog Feed: Initial commit.

See #5445

[iandunn]

The Foundation and Central blogs were added in r16488-dotorg.

[iandunn]

Gutenberg Times was added in r17081-dotorg.

[peterwilsoncc]

I've done a quick review of the feeds listed in the sidebar of planet.wordpress.org for status.

Dead links

• Jen Mylo

Off topic

• Andy Skelton (photo blog)
• Dougal Campbell (social feeds)
• Joseph Scott (politics, random)

Dormant (year of last post noted)

• Andrew Ozz (2014)
• Nacin (2015)
• gravatar (2014)
• Lloyd Dewolf (2017)
• Lorelle on WP (2018)
• Mike Little (2014)
• Westi (2013)
• pingomatic (2015)
• WordPress.com Apps (2016)
• WP TV (2016)
• mdawaffe (2015)

Some of the names in the dormant list are names I don't recognise and I'm pretty long in the tooth in terms of being a WordPress contributor. Other names I do recognise and respect, but know they haven't been contributing for a while.

If individuals are to be in the list, it would be good to refresh it to include some more recent and active contributors who blog frequently. There's probably some additional wordpress.org offical content that could be included these days.