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mozilla / webmaker.org

deprecated - https://blog.webmaker.org/whats-next-for-webmaker-tools
https://webmaker.org
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Update and consolidate Planet Webmaker aggregated blog #1203

Open OpenMatt opened 9 years ago

OpenMatt commented 9 years ago

GOAL: One up-to-date aggregated blog to rule them all

Right now we have two different Planet Webmaker aggregated blogs:

  1. http://planet.webmaker.org/
  2. http://planet.webmakerprototypes.org/

Let's pick one and phase out the other. http://planet.webmakerprototypes.org/ has the advantage of being easier to update and manage. Users simply add a feed to this Google spreadsheet: http://mzl.la/Planet_Webmaker_spreadsheet

But: it's on prototypes infrastructure. And very slow to load.

Next step: get engineering to weigh in with a proposal. Would love to resolve by the Feb 13 or 27 train, if possible.

OpenMatt commented 9 years ago

cc @simonwex @toolness

toolness commented 9 years ago

But: it's on prototypes infrastructure. And very slow to load.

Both of these can easily be changed... The spreadsheet-based one is actually built every 10 minutes and deployed to S3, so there's no reason it can't have ultra-fast caching and gzip encoding and all that jazz. (Right now it's just uploaded to S3 uncompressed with no caching headers.)

That said, it will likely always be a little slow to load simply because there's so much content in there--no getting around that, unless we want to limit the date of the oldest posts that we cull out or use some other exclusion strategy.

The one thing about the prototypes planet right now is that it doesn't do any sanitization of the HTML from the blog posts it displays. If it's being put under a subdomain of webmaker.org then it might be possible for evildoers to grab cookies on the parent webmaker.org domain and do nefarious things with them. Yuck.

OpenMatt commented 9 years ago
jdotpz commented 9 years ago

@toolness let me know what kit we need to launch here. We could potentially use Cloudfront and strip out all cookies?

davidascher commented 9 years ago

Let's start w/ simple things atul can do by himself. In particular:

Don't know the infrastructure for planet.webmaker.org, but maintainability is a win in my eyes, so happy to go w/ atul's spreadsheet hack as the authoritative one. (or figure out how one updates the other one and document it somewhere).

Do both planets create RSS/Atom/whatever feeds?

OpenMatt commented 9 years ago

Thanks for working on this, all!

Question: once we've made the performance tweaks discussed above, could we move it to this URL? http://planet.webmaker.org

Or if you prefer: re-direct http://planet.webmaker.org to http://planet.webmakerprototypes.org/

It's confusing to have an old out of date instance at planet.webmaker.org

toolness commented 9 years ago

Yeah, I can totally bust this up.

For purely security reasons, to play it absolutely safe, I'd prefer to redirect from planet.webmaker.org to planet.webmakerprototypes.org for now. I really do not want planet webmaker to accidentally open a security vulnerability to webmaker.org, and I don't have the bandwidth right now to implement HTML sanitization on it either.

excluding anything older than a month (or 3 or whatever)

It's actually currently doing this--the maximum article age for inclusion is 6 weeks--but there's just so much content in all the feeds that the page is still quite big. I can reduce it to fewer weeks, though.

Do both planets create RSS/Atom/whatever feeds?

Yep! planet.webmaker.org also exports an OPML of all the feeds in its mega-feed.

(or figure out how one updates the other one and document it somewhere).

This was sort-of the original reason for me hacking up the spreadsheets solution... IIRC, planets required bugzilla bugs to be filed in order for some unknown person to change the configuration, and they stopped responding to bugs being filed or something, so I just set up the spreadsheet-based solution to remove the bottleneck.

OpenMatt commented 9 years ago

we're talking about the blog for teach.mozilla.org, and it reminded about this oldie-but-goodie. wanted to check in and see if there was any status update on this one. or we can always wontfix -- just wanted to check.

toolness commented 9 years ago

Ah yeah, sorry, I haven't gotten around to this yet. I don't think we should WONTFIX it because there are some pretty low-hanging fruit to make the site faster to load and such, I just need to get around to doing it!