There are so many things in my personal life that are changing for the past couple of months, and I’m struggling just to keep up. I’m not planning on abandoning my online life, it’s just that I need some time off from blogs, mailing lists, etc. Once everything is settled I should be back online. Hopefully soon.

For everyone that has sent in their requests to be included in Planet Terasi, please bear with me, I will review them as soon as I’m able to do so.

I still read my emails, it’s just that I might not be able to reply to all of them. I’m sorry.

I’m signing off for now. Don’t go too far. I’ll see you soon!

Artikelnya ada di website Koran Tempo (perlu login).

Cuplikan:

Bagaimana masa depan agregat blog?

Saya rasa salah satu kuncinya ada di fokus. Aggregator blog yang bisa menjaga fokus topiknya dengan baik akan bertahan.

Kunci satu lagi ada pada kendali pengguna (user control). Sekarang ini aggregator berbasis planet tidak memberikan user control apa pun, bahkan preferensi pun tidak, karena semuanya toh di-generate menjadi halaman web statis.

Contoh ekstrem dari user control ini adalah aggregator personal, seperti Bloglines (bloglines.com). Penggunanya bebas menentukan blog mana saja yang mau diagregasi dan bisa diorganisasi sesuai dengan preferensi mereka.

Tentu saja yang saya maksud dengan “user” di “user control” dalam konteks ini adalah pengunjung situs, bukan admin aggregatornya.

Selain artikel di atas, ada satu lagi artikel mengenai aggregator secara umum.

Terima kasih, Budi dan Pujiono dari Koran Tempo.

Update 14/03: Kedua artikel di atas diposting ulang secara lengkap oleh Budi Putra di blognya.

Update 17/03: Enda menulis artikel yang berhubungan di Global Voices Online.

New features:

• Below every post title there are links to del.icio.us so that you can bookmark the post, digg to add a digg entry based on that post, and a Technorati search for other blog posts that link to that particular post.
• Date headers are clickable to hide/show posts for that date.

Let me know if something doesn’t work¹. Suggestions and constructive criticism are welcome. I have some more features planned for long term. If you like to see the development progress, check out http://beta.planet.terasi.net.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

The logo was created and submitted by Kéré Kêmplu even though the contest had officially ended without any winner. Thanks! He made some remarks in his email (quoted below) regarding the design choices which I think are quite reasonable.

why brown? i think it’s an indonesian color. :) lagian kan miip warna terasi. :D

tipografi dengan huruf ala semprot untuk mewakili dunia blog yang spontan, agak menjauhi kemapanan [ciehhhh], seperti orang bikin pamflet dan plakat.

warna kuning? yeah, pura-puranya matahari tropis gitulah. kalo dikasih biru cyan gak cocok sih.

I hope you enjoy the new look.

Thanks!

We need a logo for Planet Terasi. Based on suggestions from Avianto and Pujiono, I’m going to hold a Planet Terasi Logo Contest.

Update: Thomas offered an additional prize for the winner! Read below.

Update: This contest has officially ended with no winners, since there were no submitted entries. Thanks.

OK, here’s how we play the game:

1. The logo must be representative of Planet Terasi, either representing the name “Planet Terasi”, or representing Indonesian bloggers (extra points if it represents especially Planet Terasi inhabitants; I know it may be hard that’s why I settled on the more general Indonesian bloggers). A simple but catchy logo is preferred.
2. The entry must contain at least one primary high-quality version of the logo at 1024×768 minimum resolution. Alternative high-quality versions with smaller size but for different purpose (e.g. for banners) will also be accepted as an addition to the high-resolution version.
3. Logo with no text is preferred, but if you must then the only text allowed is “Planet Terasi” (unless for the alternative versions) and the text must be much smaller in proportion to the whole logo. A logo consisting of the text “Planet Terasi” dominantly is not acceptable.
4. All submitted work must be licensed under a Creative Commons license, and Planet Terasi may select one or more of the submitted entries to be used in Planet Terasi website or other Planet Terasi related publications (if any in the future). Planet Terasi will give full attributions and credits to the original author when their work is used.
5. Contestants may submit more than one entry.
6. The accepted image file formats for the logo are: SVG and PNG only. Other (especially lossy-compressed) image formats will not be accepted.
7. Send your submissions by email to contest@terasi.net. One email per entry, please. Include the image(s), your name, email address, website URL (optional) and optionally a brief description (e.g. the rationales, what you’d like people to notice, etc.) about the image(s).
8. Entries must be original work and they must never be published before.
9. Submissions containing profanity, pornography, and other offending materials will not be accepted. Tasteful art will be considered.
10. The latest submission date and time is Wednesday, 6 July 2005 at 11:59:59 PM Western Indonesia Time (GMT+7), after that the contest is closed.
11. The judging is 50% based on votes on the entries by the inhabitants of Planet Terasi (1 inhabitant gets 1 vote), and 50% by a judging panel of which the members will be selected by Ronny Haryanto and announced at a later time. The entry with the highest points wins and will be used as Planet Terasi’s primary logo for an indefinite amount of time.
12. The judging panel reserves the right to extend the contest period or to cancel the contest at any time without declaring any winner.
13. These rules are subject to change at any time without notice. Ronny Haryanto reserves the right to change and make up the rules as he sees fit.
14. This contest is open to anyone, even non Planet Terasi inhabitants, except Ronny Haryanto and the members of the judging panel.

Unfortunately I can’t afford to offer a lot of money or expensive stuff to the winner. I will, however, give the winner a 50 MB or a forwarder email account: your.name@planet.terasi.net or your.name@terasi.net. Update: good news, our friend Thomas Arie Setiawan is kind enough to make this contest more interesting. Thanks, Thomas! Here’s his message to me:

Saya mau “memberi” 1 buah domain untuk yang logonya dipakai. Free selama 2 tahun (.COM/.NET/.ORG).

If you have any questions or suggestions, please post them as comments to this blog entry.

If you are a Planet Terasi inhabitant and you would like to be a member of the judging panel (that means you can’t submit any entries), please contact Ronny Haryanto privately.

By the way, I’m planning to do a facelift for Planet Terasi, hopefully in the near future. No promises and nothing fancy, I just want to make it look nicer to read for people who don’t use RSS aggregators to read Planet Terasi.

I’m also interested in suggestions for other aggregator software like Planet (which is used by Planet Terasi) that supports:

• Blog aggregating (duh!),
• RSS (ideally all versions, but version 1 and 2 at least must be supported),
• Atom (mostly for blogger.com users that don’t have RSS feedburner feeds),
• flexible templates or templating system (ideally),
• can provide blogrolls in either OPML or FOAF or both (ideally),
• can sort entries by timestamp within a date instead of by the order specified in the config file,
• (minor) can make sticky post only to the aggregate blog (e.g. in planet terasi only) (this can be done manually with a flexible templating system, of course).

Planet can fulfill almost all of the above quite nicely (with some minor quirks), I don’t mind if I keep using Planet for Planet Terasi, but I’m just curious if there are better approaches. I’ve tried Drupal to do this, it’s still not very good at this moment, although it works perfectly well for other projects. Suggestions are welcome!

Update: Well, that near future is really near, apparently. I have updated Planet Terasi‘s theme, and I think it looks much better and more usable now than before.

Update: I’ve upgraded Planet Terasi to use the latest version of Planet from Scott’s GNU Arch repository. The empty Atom posts bug is gone now, so feedburner RSS is no longer required. The sort ordering works as I requested above in the new version. And other minor fixes. I can probably stop looking for other aggregating solution now. I can probably hack the script for sticky post that appears in the page and in the feeds as well. Python is really cool.