Colin Charles Agenda

Some Planet MySQL changes over time

First up: I normally read Planet MySQL from an RSS reader. I am assuming you do too. But in the interest of all the new features that the website itself has, I thought I’d take some time to talk about them in brief (to respect your time). Needless to say, go forth and check out Planet MySQL if you’ve not been there in a while.

A change in URL

We used to go to http://planetmysql.org but now it redirects to http://planet.mysql.com/.

Its also worth noting that from a Google PageRank of 8, Planet MySQL has dropped to a PageRank of 6. One wonders why?

Voting

Sometimes, Planet MySQL has got totally unrelated posts. They might be press releases that no one likes, or a post like this, which talks about Planet MySQL. Planet MySQL is after all touted as “Your blogs, news and opinions”, so I guess this post is in line with that. So unless I’m blatantly selling sexually enhancing drugs, or talking about thing that are unrelated to MySQL, I don’t think one should be voting down such a post. Anyway, I digress.

You get 5 votes per 24-hour period. This is to probably prevent gaming the system. And there’s visual appeal too, to voting.

Anyway, you can see the top voted (last week), and top voted (last month), on the left hand column of planet now. So if you want something to be located prominently, start getting your friends to “digg” the site ;)

Searching


A feature that is not talked about often enough… Everytime the planet crawls your site (:20 minutes off the hour, if I remember correctly), it slurps the entire page. Sure, it displays it as an excerpt (so we don’t take away Google juices from you), but we do keep a massive archive of all planet postings… So even if your blog goes away from the Internet, it will always live on in the archives.

Its worth noting its searchable! So maybe you read something that’s interesting two years ago, but have no idea what its about. You can search, even by tags. Wow! I think this could be a pretty useful feature, if using Google itself, has failed you…

Tags

In WordPress, there are options for “tags” and “categories”. Tags only came around relatively recently, it was always categories previously. Now, SimplePie reads those tags when it slurps the entire page, and it gets displayed. When logged in, you can even edit the tags. I tried this, but it didn’t seem to quite work yet, even when logged in. Maybe I just found a bug, let me report it…

Buzz

Have you seen MySQL Buzz? Its a dashboard, showing you where people talk about MySQL in its entirety – voted entries, forums, Google love, and those fabulous word frequency clouds!

Today, I noticed that on Planet, we’ve seen famous words like: data, database, time, server, innodb, chrome, table, performance. In the Forums, its quite different: string, long, table, null, insert, code. Ha!

Anything else?

Go forth and vote for this post, if you’ve read this far. Next time, I’ll talk about the Librarian after I’ve tried it out. A post like this would never make it there (since this is very community focused), but think of it like a knowledge base/bank and it can be rather powerful.