Add your blog in Fedora Planet!

Today I decided to join the fedora planet, and sync from now on every fedora-related post in the planet. I eventually bought a domain for my blog (previsouly I had the one that openshift gave me), and today I found some free time to handle this.

The only requirement set is to be approved in a non-cla group in FAS. Any group would work! Being an approved member in a non-cla group gives you more rights & privileges within the Project. The few things I recall right now, are email aliases (your_username@fedoraproject.org), voting rights, when we have any kind of elections, and free webspace in fedorapeople.org

Join the Fedora Planet!

It’s quite easy to add your site to the Planet, and in ~5 minutes you will be done. In order to do so, you have to make a file with the link to your site in your fedorapeople account.

To start, you have to upload your public key in the accounting system of Fedora. If you don’t have a pair of public/private SSH key, you can easily create one by opening up the terminal and type:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Then you will be asked where would you like to save the keys, and if you would like to set a password. Hit the enter button on all questions, so the keys will be saved in the default folder ~/.ssh , without a password.

Now head over to the account system in Fedora, and in the Public RSA SSH Key field, click Browse to upload your id_rsa.pub public key in the Fedora servers, in order to connect to fedorapeople.org. The file will be in the .ssh folder in your Home directory (if you didn’t change the file that your keys were saved during the generation process). The dot ‘.’ in the .ssh folder indicates that the folder is hidden, but you can easily find it if your browse your folders by Location. When you find the id_rsa.pub file, click to upload it. That’s it! Now wait for ~30 minutes in order for your key to be saved and be able to access your fedorapeople account.

After that, open a terminal and login to your fedorapeople account. Do so by typing:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa <your_fedora_id>@fedorapeople.org

Of course don’t forget to replace the <your_fedora_id> with your fas username, in my case, mitzie. Please note that it may take an hour for the server to sync your uploaded public key, and many repeated failed attempts will ban your IP, so patience is the key!

Now you have to decide which category or tag you would like the Planet to be able to aggregate and sync your posts. In my case, I have set up a new Tag (because I have many different Fedora categories ), so every time I link a new post with the specific Tag, it will be synced with the Planet. The Tag I use is ‘fplanet’, and the link for the Tag is fplanet. The Planet in order to sync your posts, uses RSS Feeds from your blog, and each category or post has a Feed itself. So choose a specific category or a Tag, add the feed url in it, and save the url, we are going to need it later!

Now we need to make a .planet file in our fedorapeople account with the specifc link, in order for the planet to sync our posts. Go back to the terminal that you are connected to fedorapeople, and type:

touch .planet

This will create the file .planet. Now edit it with the following command:

nano .planet

And when the editor opens, paste these lines:

[http://yourname.wordpress.com/tag/fedora/feed/]

name = Your Name

Replace the url to the specific Tag/Category that we saved later, replace ‘Your Name’ with yours, press Ctrl+X, type yes and then press enter to save the file.

That was it! Now when you make a new post in your blog and add the Tag or add it in the Category you set, within a few minutes it will show in Fedora Planet!

There are also instructions in this wiki page