Planet Tao of Mac - Frequently Asked Questions

This information is, as of January 2010, officially obsolete, and is kept here merely as reference.

Well, after keeping track of “Gnome”:Wikipedia:GNOME events through Planet Gnome for a few months and with the launch of prt.sc (then called Asterisco), I started wondering where were all the Mac OS X immigrants/geeks with a UNIX background. So one day I picked up Planet Planet, bashed it into submission and wrapped K2 and some PHP around it.

That was back in 2005 or so. Come end of January 2008, I decided to simplify things a bit and get rid of the PHP wrapper, as well as tweaking some things here and there on my server setup. By that time, the changes required were minimal, but one of the main ones consisted of moving its FAQ to this page on my main site for easier maintenance.

Only in the sense that it runs in the same box. I used a different (more angular) design for it to highlight that it’s not the same site.

Well, you have to be a Mac user (obvious, right?), and (preferably) possessing a strong UNIX background. Geography is irrelevant (although most of the original posse knows each other personally). Just drop me a line with your contact info, feed URLs, etc., and, if you feel like it, you can throw in an optional “hackergotchi” image to go alongside your posts.

Because that’s where a lot of the interesting aspects of Mac OS X lie, and because there will always be enough non-geek blogs around. But since the point of having a “Planet” is gathering different views, if you’re a Mac-centric designer, developer, reporter, etc., you can join as well.

Simple. Feeds should not contain any advertising, and none is (or will ever be) added to the planet’s RSS feed (which is how I expect most people to read the site anyway). The AdSense ads on the Planet’s sidebar revert towards site maintenance (and if you think that sort of thing brings in any real money in this era of ad blockers, you’re sorely mistaken…)

And yes, that means all feeds. Even my own blog-only feed is included there without any advertising (although if you’d like to Sponsor my site or the Planet, you’re welcome to).

No, the Planet simply re-publishes each site’s current RSS feed and merges the last few posts in a single feed for your convenience. There used to be a simple search function for the last 24h or so, but I removed it to ease maintenance.

If you had bothered to read anything I write (such as my HOWTOs , my main FAQ or pretty much everything else), you’d know by now that I’m not partial to any platform – I just stick to what works for me in any given context, and as it happens, Mac OS X happens to be it for most of what I do.

I (and plenty other people on the Planet) also use Windows and many flavors of UNIX, so if you want to label any of the people on this site as a “zealot” of any kind, you are way off the mark and should take a very close look at yourself first.

Labeling people for what they use/like is a cop-out – understanding why they do it is the interesting part, and is a step that, sadly, very few people seem to take.