Atlantides: Feed Aggregators for Ancient Studies

I've put together the following feed aggregators for the benefit of anyone who would like to make use of them. Please remember: the content pulled together here is still governed by the licensing or copyright preferences of the originating bloggers. Always check with the original author before re-using any of this content!

Most frequently given answer: Please do not ask me to "post" notices about your individual posts to these aggregators. Content here is automatically scooped up from the blogs and sites listed on the individual subscription lists if their feeds are formatted in a standard way and are readily accessible on the web. If you think that your blog or website should be included in a particular aggregator, but it does not appear in the associated subscription list, please contact me with a request for its addition. Note that I reserve the right to say a respectful "no."

If you think there are feeds that should be added to one of these aggregators, please email me with your suggestion. Similarly, if you don't want your blog included here, I'll happily remove it on request. I am solely responsible for the subscription lists for these aggregators, and make no guarantees as to what I'll include. My employer has no policy role in this service, which I may choose to terminate at any time.

Many thanks to the Ancient World Bloggers Group for the idea, to Sam Ruby for his Venus branch of Planet, and Sean Gillies for setup help.

Other blog aggregators

  • Blogs en Χείρων · Chiron
    • This blog aggregator -- part of the collaborative Χείρων · Chiron project -- gathers content from nearly 150 mostly Spanish-language, classics-oriented blogs; almost none of these are represented in Maia or Electra. Subscribe: Blogs en Χείρων · Chiron (Atom Feed).
    • Updated 11 Feb 2008: I hope eventually to combine this feed into the Maia aggregator, but right now it's exhibiting encoding problems (characters above base ASCII are getting borked). This is strange, given it displays fine in Firefox (but not in the venus output, nor in my RSSOwl client). I'll have to set aside some time to try to figure out what's going awry.

Feed reading, bots, and user agents

As implied above, Planet Atlantides uses Sam Ruby's "Venus" branch of the Planet "river of news" feed reader. That code is written in the Python language and uses an earlier version of the Universal Feed Reader library for fetching web feeds (RSS and Atom formats). Out of the box, its http requests use the feed parser's default user agent string, so your server logs will only have recorded "UniversalFeedParser/4.2-pre-274-svn +http://feedparser.org/" when our copy of the software pulled your feed in the past.

Effective 27 February 2014, the Planet Atlantides production version of the code now identifies itself with the following user agent string: "PlanetAtlantidesFeedBot/0.2 +http://planet.atlantides.org/". Production code runs on a machine with the IP address 66.35.62.81, and never runs more than once per hour. Apart for a one-time set of test episodes on 27 February 2014 itself, log entries recording our user agent string and a different IP address represent spoofing by a potential bad actor other than me and my automagical bot. You should nuke them from orbit; it's the only way to be sure. Note that from time-to-time, I may run test code from other IP addresses, but I will in future use the user agent string beginning with "PlanetAtlantidesTestBot" for such runs. You can expect them to be infrequent and irregular.

Please email me if you have any questions about Planet Atlantides, its bot, or these user agent strings. In particular, if you put something like "PlanetAtlantidesBot is messing up my site" in your subject line, I'll look at it and respond as quickly as I can.


Last modified: 27 February 2014; individual planets aggregate new feed content daily or hourly, depending on past activity

Tom Elliott

Associate Director for Digital Programs

Institute for the Study of the Ancient World

New York University

Email:

Home page: http://www.paregorios.org