Planet Midgard is the blog aggregator displaying what's going on in the Midgard community.

Planet Midgard is now running latest version of net.nemein.rss aggregator, meaning a bunch of new things:

• Support for feeds in Atom format (previously we could aggregate only RSS feeds)
• UTF-8 support, meaning that we can now aggregate blog postings in non-western characters (especially Russian seems to be popular in the Midgard community)
• Hackergotchi support: if your feed has been marked to contain a "hacker head", it will be displayed together with your posts. See Planet GNOME for a good example on this

So, with these updates I would like to call for two things:

First of all, if you're a member of the Midgard community (contributor or active user), please get your blog aggregated on Planet Midgard. If you already have a blog, just mail me the URL to your RSS or Atom feed.

And if you don't have a blog, please start one. Blogs are a great way to communicate your ideas and stuff you're working on.

It is very easy to start blogging, either just create a new Midgard topic powered by the de.linkm.newsticker component, or sign up to one of the free services like Advogato or Blogger.

Note that we can also aggregate news releases from Midgard companies, and blog postings in languages other than English. Planet Midgard already aggregates Nico's posts in German, Alexander's posts in Russian and WALHI's posts in Indonesian.

Second, if you're already aggregated on Planet Midgard, please make a hacker head image of yourself. This gives a face to your posts, adding to the community feeling. If you see who is posting, it is easier to feel it as a conversation:

The hacker head (or hackergotchi) is an approximately 65 pixel wide and 85 pixel high transparent PNG image showing your face detached from its surroundings and added with a drop shadow. See some examples in Planet GNOME.

Once you have your hackergotchi image done, upload it somewhere and mail me the link (you can also mail me the image itself).

If you don't have the necessary graphics skills, mail URL to image you want to have it made from here and somebody will help you out.

BTW, for those with RSS aggregators (like NetNewsWire or Thunderbird), Planet Midgard is available at http://www.midgard-project.org/planet/rss.xml

Updated 2004-12-14: Hackergotchis displayed on Planet Midgard are now displayed also on a separate collection page.