If you are on twitter and following all things related to SharePoint, it’s impossible not to have see the RTs coming from Planet SharePoint. The really useful part, though, is that Planet SharePoint is actually a site that archives all of the RTs. I asked Yancy Lent, owner of Planet SharePoint, to give us an idea of what he is trying to do and what the future holds for his site. — Mark

Guest Author: Yancy Lent
Planet SharePoint

Planet SharePoint aggregates blog posts from almost 200 SharePoint focused blogs. Each blog is checked every 20 minutes ensuring readers get the latest SharePoint information. New posts are added to the front page in chronological order and posted to Twitter. Before posting to the twitter feed {http://twitter.com/pl_sharepoint} the title is evaluated for industry keywords and hash tagged accordingly, ensuring maxim exposure. The blog polling also works to ensure blogs are still operating and quality checks are done every month or so to make sure every blog listed is actively blogging about SharePoint. Please be assured, I know the difference between not blogging and NDA silence.

Favorite Feature

My favorite feature is the use of post views or click totals as a method of crowd sourcing. Each post click through is totaled no matter where it comes from: the site, twitter, the feed. This gives the reader a temperature of sorts of what people are reading. This is also used to track the most popular posts and blogs on the front page.

History of Planet SharePoint

I started the site to further my understanding of SharePoint, the community and partner echo-system. I work as a Sales Engineer for Axceler and had to come up to speed quick on all things relating to SharePoint administration for our release of ControlPoint back in early 2008. I’ve had spotted success with other planets, they take the right kind of community to take off; the more passion the greater a chance for success.

The site is homemade and sits on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PhP) with the exception of an open source class to do the feed parsing, called Magpie RSS. The site concept is not original, there are many other Planet sites out there mainly revolving around (pun intended) Linux technologies. I’ve tweaked the concept to focus more on the title and excerpt instead of the whole post. This makes it easier to peruse a large set of posts and give the original author the site visit they desire.

What’s in the Future?

The future of the site involves greater integration with Twitter and Facebook. My next effort will include Twitter OAuth to allow writers and readers to manage their data and possibly track certified reads either publicly or privately with zero effort. I’m also looking into cross-pollinating with other SharePoint community sites to aggregating community events and serve them up via iCal. Bottom line, it’s a blank slate in many ways and I’m always up for new ideas.

Guest Author: Yancy Lent
Planet SharePoint

Yancy has over 14 years of experience working as a developer, administrator, consultant, and sales engineer for enterprise collaborative platforms. For the past 2 years his focus has been working with SharePoint Administrators as a Senior Sales Engineer at Axceler. To see a gallery of other websites he’s created check out http://www.collaborancy.com.