Putting your money where your mouth is, or How to piss off everyone
Yesterday, a buddy and fellow podcaster, Dave Yates emailed a bunch of people, myself included, about an idea he had. His idea was to have a “planet” for the podcasters. A “planet” for those uninitiated is an aggregated weblog/feed where many people’s separate content is merged together in one place for convenience sake (mostly).
Everyone joined in with a resounding “that sounds cool” and the topic progressed about how and where we could get something like that going. I figured I would put my money where my mouth was, and after checking with my hosting company, purchased a domain and offered to host the thing as well. I purchased http://linuxplanet.org. It was getting late in the evening, but I took a few minutes to research and slap up a mockup/test site, which was met with kudos from the crowd.
Today, after my dns was working, I quickly set up the site for real and added a few feeds. I posted a note for people to check it out and that’s where the real fun began. Apparently there was some misunderstanding between parties about the intent of the site. I was under the impression that we were going to aggregate the peoples blogs, and others were under the impression that we were going to aggregate podcast feeds. Suffice it to say that after many emails telling me that I was completely wrong, I decided to make 2 websites. One of the sites aggregates Linux blogs. You can find it at http://linuxplanet.org/blogs. The other site aggregates Linux video/podcasts. You can find it at http://linuxplanet.org/casts The funny part about the whole thing is Dann IMing me during the process. You see we have been doing projects like this together for some time and we have both been privy to the nastygrams that invariably come. Anyway, Dann would make some snide comment in jest about not having this site set up the way he wanted and how he felt slighted or some such thing and no sooner would he send that to me than I would get an email from someone saying almost the exact same thing 🙂
I never learn my lesson I guess 🙂 Anyway, please take time to check the new sites out. I believe they are going to be big hits. They do, of course, need your help too. They need your content, your suggestions, your graphical talents, and, of course, your patronage too! Don’t be afraid to send me emails at lincdotfessendenatgmaildotcom!