Walter asked the excellent question:

The difference between “open.wikiblogplanet.com” and “wikiblogplanet.com” is not clear to me. Yes, the open version can be edited online on the wiki and the other not. But the two seem nearly identical. What is benefit of using the non-open version? Why does the non-open version exist?

The answer is that the open one was originally an experiment, with the non-open one as a fallback in case the open one flopped. It’s not perfect, but the open one seems to be working well and expanding quickly (e.g. currently up to around 53 feeds versus 36 for the non-open one), and having two planets that looked so similar was just confusing for readers.

So, as of 5 minutes ago, http://wikiblogplanet.com was set to redirect to http://open.wikiblogplanet.com ; This means that the non-open planet is gone, and there is now only the open planet, which should hopefully eliminate any confusion, whilst keeping all the good stuff. Any old bookmarks you have will still work okay (you’ll get redirected), so you don’t have to do anything (unless you’re grabbing an ATOM feed from the planet, in which case you just need to add “open.” to the start of the URL).

The result is that we’re now back to two planets, each with different takes: Open Wiki Blog Planet (more flavourful, more feeds, you can add and edit the feeds directly, more prone to temporarily blowing up due to a bad config file or shared webhost downtime), and Planet Wikimedia (more focussed, slightly fewer feeds, you request to be added by a dev, very unlikely to blow up).

Also, you can now have add a hackergotchi, avatar, logo, or icon to your feed of blog entries on Open Wiki Blog Planet, if you want to. You just need the URL to the image on the web (example of adding avatar).

For the Planet Wikimedia folks, suggest editing the Planet’s “index.html.tmpl” file, and changing this line:

<img class=”face” src=”images/<TMPL_VAR channel_face ESCAPE=”HTML”>” width ….

to:

<img class=”face” src=”<TMPL_VAR channel_face ESCAPE=”HTML”>” width ….

That way we can both use the same images on the web, rather than each downloading images to our separate “images/” directories, and we can just copy-and-paste face / facewidth / faceheight lines between our config files.