planets and day 19 of the beard

I notice that Planet Linux Australia has been changed to not list the feeds URLs, instead it displays the HTML pages for the blogs.

I believe this is a bad idea as some people want to get a list of feeds for the blogs that are aggregated without having to visit all the blog sites and do it manually. One of the many reasons for doing this is for a blog server that has intermittent net access, it might be down at the moment which prevents me from adding it to my feed list. Another reason is that some people (such as me) want to automatically get a list of all feeds from the planet to add to their own personal planet configuration.

I am blogging this not to criticise the administrators of Planet Linux Australia or even to inform them (I have already send them an email). My point is to prevent other people from doing the same thing. At this time I am not sure whether this change in Planet Linux Australia was deliberate, a result of a bug in Planet, or a mistake in configuration (maybe a default changed unexpectedly).

Another planet related surprise that I received today was to notice that my blog appears to have been removed from Planet Fedora. I'm not sure why this happened, one possibility is that removing my blog was regarded as the solution to the problem of it displaying incorrectly (the better solution being to upgrade the Planet software as was done on Planet Debian). Another possibility is that my post about Gratis vs Libre was regarded as criteria for removal. If my blog was removed from Planet Debian or Planet Linux Australia then I would be able to ask the administrators about this (they have email address links conveniently located). Planet Fedora has no such link, so I guess I'll have to wait for a blog comment to find out.

I've included a day 19 beard picture, I was planning to do one yesterday but a design meeting for a VOIP project ran late and I ran out of time. I'll write a post about VOIP in the near future.