PerlPlanet
I hate to always criticise other people’s work, but Planet is a piece of crap. I tried it on my favourite blogs to fire up friends.thiesen.org and besides not working on Atom feeds as it should it completely died on another feed and had encoding issues. I tried to fix it, but it appears as if the feed reader library they are using is far too old (they are using 2.2 something, 4.0-pre is the curernt version) and it is Python and I can’t do Python.
PerlPlanet to the rescue. Because there was no other implementation of a Planet like thing and I thought it couldn’t be that hard, I wrote a replacement myself. PerlPlanet can do everything except the Hackergotchi feature while staying compatible with Planets own templates and configuration files. Turns out it is even 500 lines less, though you have to install quite a bunch of Modules, but you should be used to that by now.
Get it here.
P.S.: WordPress 2.0 Beta rocks…