Planet Spaghetti Western

thatā€™s why you can comfortly put the planet into your RSS reader and read the stuff whenever you have the time, no need to even go to planet.spaghetti-western.net anymore :wink:

In case you havenā€™t noticed, I have begun to redesign the planet. I wanted to make it more accessible, more pleasing to the eye, and more looking like a newspaper/magazine that is fun to browse. It includes not only latest blogs, but also some stuff from the twitter feed, our Almeria photo album, and more.

I still have to fix a lot of small things, and find a balance between automatically syndicated blogs, and content I put up mysellf. I don want to post more reviews, as it is super easy to subscribe to the planet via RSS, but the SWDB itself is not very nice to subscribe to.

I am also looking for feedback, so please let me know what you think. And I am looking for authors. Whoever wants to blog (about anything) about SWs, and doesnt have his/her own blog, youā€™re more than welcome.

Those that do, and that I have syndicated, I will probably be emailing you soonā€¦

redesigned the Planet a bit, let me know what you think

Perhaps the ā€œSyndicated Blogsā€ should have more space. I liked the previously version in which every post came with a part of the text.

I agree.

it was very hard to find a decent layout that would accomodate the best of both worlds.

Hereā€™s what I didnā€™t like about the previous layout: things got buried pretty quickly, and the whole layout looked like a cheap Twitter clone. Also, in the long run I want to have more of a magazine feel to it, mixed with non-syndicated content, and the chance for people to discuss in the commenting section of the blog entries, and a way to announce really cool reviews or content of the SWDB. So I was looking for a way to put as much diverse content into one spot as possible, and I am now closer to it.

This is by no means the last word, it is still an experiment of sorts.

Another problem is technical: It is not easy to syndicate these external sources, which often have sloppy html code, and include them properly into one website, picture thumbnails etc. For example, I could define to catch the first 50 words of an external blog post, but if that blog post starts with a cast list or someothing, it will take up half a page, even though in the end itā€™s just a few wordsā€¦ things like that are hard to controlā€¦

I would love to hear more feedback though. To me, the ideal way would be to have a two-column layout, syndicated blogs to the left, and SWDB-proper content on the other, and some twitter and picture stuff in between or something.

However, we neither have the manpower/skill nor the money to do something on our own, so I am stuck with finding a pre-existing layout/template/look and adapting it a bit to our needs, all that in the evening hoursā€¦

I understand your point of view.

We are ceasing the @planetspaghetti twitter account and the facebook page. both will now be fed into the @swdatabase and SWDB facebook page. everything else stays the same

Hi, this may be a dumb questionā€¦ As you said earlier itā€™s super-easy to subscribe to the RSS feed of Planet SW. However, there seems to be much less happening than in the chronological list displayed on the main page, for new articles, reviews and such. On the main page I can only find a RSS feed for all changes to the database which is not what Iā€™m looking for. Is there a way to get all the stuff listed on main page into my RSS reader? Thanks!

hi

there is currently no RSS feed for what u see on the ā€œmain pageā€ on the SWDB, for technical reasons. This is a hand-made list of new additions. The Planet is a separate blog, its RSS feed only brings you articles from there.
Ideally, we would offer one feed to suscribe to that unifies both, but for that I currently lack the resources to implement it. The closest to that currently is following our Facebook pageā€¦

Alles klar, danke!

Latest article on The Planet:

http://planet.spaghetti-western.net/small-fundraiser-to-pimp-up-the-swdb/

Not so sure about the future of the Planet. The effort to get a blog up and going would be okay if we had more authors from around the world willing to publish there. We dont. It would be nice to have an open blog for spaghetti western enthusiasts from anywhere to post there (that was the idea), but at the same time, if there is no demand for that, I might as well save myself the trouble, close it down and put the content that is already there into the main SWDB or some sections of the forum.
Thoughts?

What I wrote in August, still pretty much counts. I get an article here and there, but for the most part, thatā€™s not something we couldnā€™t publish elsewhere. And as this forumā€™s technical prowess is so much greater than before, between this forum and the SWDb proper, maybe there really is no need for a separate blog?

@Djangoisme @scherpschutter what are your thoughts?

I was thinking about writing an article for The Planet (about the different
approach of Mexico - country and revolution - in the Zapata westerns and
American movies like Villa Rides and the wild Bunch), but that could be put
up in SWDB database as well

Yea as much as I really love working with wordpress, and having a wordpress blog, I am really not sure what the value of an extra channel for our case really is. I mean the biggest problem really is this: you can ā€œsubscribeā€ to a blog (RSS feed, etc), but it is hard to accomplish that with the Wikiā€¦

So I will shut down the Planet. It was an experiment, and I failed at it. I guess we just concentrate on SWDb content, and we also have this forum here where we can also post news and smaller articles, etc.

I will transfer all relevant content into the SWDb soon and then shut it down.

In loving memoryā€¦

So we raise our glasses one more timeā€¦ now shutting the Planet down. All relevant content has already been transferred back into the SWDb