There were many emails in the GSoC mailing list regarding ‘sharing’ blogs with the GSoC community. Many GSoC students keep blogs to track their progress. It becomes really tough to track hundreds of blogs so I thought of starting a blog aggregator.
Most of the solutions that had been developed until now required setting up a server that would generate a static file of all the blogs. But I wanted a solution that was easy to set up and could be deployed by anyone by clicking a single button on github.
The motivation for this was my conversation with James Lopeman (meflin) on irc who is an org-admin at the Python Software Foundation. Before that conversation, I had already set up a simple method using river5 developed by Dave Winer but later I extended it to include a deploy on openshift button.
Currently, around 48 blogs are indexed by PlanetGSoC. It can be forked by anyone to deploy their own planet on GitHub.io since it uses JSONP requests to fetch the JSON river from the server running on openshift.
Feel free to fork the project or contribute! And if you have a blog related to GSoC be sure to send a pull request.