A more secure Planet PostgreSQL

Today, Planet PostgreSQL was switched over from http to https. Previously, https was only used for the logged in portions for blog owners, but now the whole site uses it. If you access the page with the http protocol, you will automatically be redirected to https.

As part of this, the RSS feeds have also changed address from http to https (the path part of the URLs remain unchanged). If your feed reader does not automatically follow redirects, this will unfortunately make it stop updating until you have changed the URL.

In a couple of days we will enable HTTP Strict Transport Security on the site as well.

We apologize for the inconvenience for those of you who have to reconfigure your feeds, but we hope you agree the change is for the better.

A new version of Planet PostgreSQL

I have just pushed code for a new version of the codebase for Planet PostgreSQL.

For those of you who are just reading Planet, hopefully nothing at all should change. There will probably be some bugs early on, but there are no general changes in functionality. If you notice something that is wrong (given a couple of hours from this post at least), please send an email to planet(at)postgresql.org and we'll look into it!

For those who have your blogs aggregated at Planet PostgreSQL, there are some larger changes. In particular, you will notice the whole registration interface has been re-written. Hopefully that will make it easier to register blogs, and also to manage the ones you have (such as removing a post that needs to be hidden). The other major change is that Planet PostgreSQL will now email you whenever something has been fetched from your blog - to help you catch configuration mistakes bigger.

The by far largest changes are in the moderation and administration backend. This will hopefully lead to faster processing of blog submissions, and less work for the moderators.

Planet integration update

This post is one of those seriously annoying ones that's just here to verify that the updates I've made to the twitter integration of planet works. Since Twitter are terminating the type of authentication we were using, I had to change it. It is a change to a better method, but still somewhat annoying.

If you're interested in looking at the code, it's up on github and on git.postgresql.org.

Some planet updates

I found myself unexpected with a day home with nothing but boring chores to do really, so I figured a good way to get out of doing those would be to do some work on the backlog of things that I've been planning to do for planet.postgresql.org. I realize that my blog is turning into a release-notes-for-planet lately since I haven't had much time to blog about other things. So I may as well confess right away that one reason to post is to make sure the updates I deployed actually work...

This round of updates have been around the twitter integration:

• Since it turned out that a lot of people didn't actually know there was a twitter integration for planet, it is now linked clearly from the planet frontpage.
• The twitter integration scripts (originally by Selena have been rewritten to work directly with our database of posts instead of pulling back in the RSS feed that the system had just generated, and also to keep the status of posts in the database. With luck, this will fix the very rare case where posts sometimes got dropped, and it made the code a lot simpler.
• The posts made by the system will refer to the twitter username of the blog owner, if it's registered. For your own blogs, you can see what username is registered by going to the registration site. We've added some of the twitter usernames we know about - if yours is not listed, please let us know at planet@postgresql.org what twitter username to connect with what blog url.
• The system has been prepared to pull out some usage statistics, but nothing is actually done with that yet.

Planet updates

I've just deployed a new version of the code that runs http://planet.postgresql.org. Most of this code was written by Selena and me during the initial days at PGCon. It just needed some minor polishing, which I didn't get around to until now. So, the new things are:

Support for Team blogs : This is just a grouping of existing blogs, not actually something new we parse. The idea is to give some exposure to a team someone works for - for example, a specific PostgreSQL support company.

Top posters list : The list of all subscriptions has been replaced with a list of top posters. The list was becoming a bit too large to manage, and didn't really fill a purpose. And it was hard to integrate nicely with the Team blogs feature.

There has also been a bunch of internal changes : Details available in the git repo on http://git.postgresql.org.

If you want to make use of the Team blogs feature, this has unfortunately not been implemented in the admin interface. We (well, me, really) were just a bit too lazy for that. So if you want to make use of it, please just send an email to planet@postgresql.org letting us know what name you want for the team, and which blogs to add to it (these blogs should already be subscribed to planet).