Someone asked us per email: “How are blogs selected for Planet PHP? “. So here's a little FAQ about that. I'll put that later somewhere on Planet PHP, just too lazy right now.

* Who's behind it?

Mainly Tobias Schlitt and me. The PHP Group has nothing to do with it.

* How are blogs selected for Planet PHP?

There's no real policy behind it. If we find an interesting blog or someone sends us one, then we have a look at it, and if it has unique content or is a well-known php-developer, we add it. We're not very picky, but prefer personal blogs over project blogs and blogs of people, we heard before over complete strangers ;)

We also usually just take PHP related content from those blogs. This generally means, that we aggregate the PHP category feed of it, as the usual Planet PHP reader is not interested in the well-beings of your cat ;) Most weblog software supports that nowadays.

* Can you put the author names to the title in the RSS feeds?

Use the RSS 0.92 feed, it has the author name in the title field, the other 2 feeds use the dc:creator field. For a more detailed discussion of this, see another blog post by me.

* How can I add my blog to planet php?

Use the submit form, with the link to your blog and to your PHP related and valid RSS feed. Feedvalidator.org is a pretty good feed validator, btw. If you don't hear anything back from us within some days, just send it again. Sometimes some mails just get lost in the INBOXes…

* X published Y on Planet PHP, which has nothing to do with PHP.

So what? First, it really happens not often, so we can definitively live with that. And second, we don't have controls over the authors and we do really not want to check posts all the time and delete the ones, which may offend or bore people.

* How does it work?

We have a list of RSS Feeds. A custom script – with the help of MagpieRSS – checks them every half hour and inserts any new posts into our database, which is then displayed with the help of Popoon (therefore no need to check Planet PHP more than every half hour ;))

and some other magic

* Can I get the software?

Sure. But only via Subversion from http://svn.bitflux.ch/repos/public/planet-php/trunk/

* Do you want to hear feedback?

Of course we do. Be it suggestions or something else, just write us (or put it in the comments here)

Update: First suggestion by Wez. Truncate too long entries. We do that now, if the entry is longer than 3500 chars, we snip it and add an additional link to the original post.