The MySQL Librarian is a collection of community-generated and cross referenced content related to MySQL. It’s a place where the community, collaboratively, builds and maintains MySQL content.

The idea started two years ago. During the MySQL conference, the blog posts were going fast and furiously down the screen. There were so many blog posts on Planet MySQL that their average life was 1 hour or less. Some of them went to the second page without having enjoyed a single minute of top page exposure. And then there were the presentation files, hidden or forgotten on some site, and never to be seen again, especially when you need them months later. After the conference, between travel, catching up with email, and whatever happens next, you lose track of most the interesting content that was generated by some of the best community members in the ecosystem. And the same happens when you go on vacation for two weeks. When you come back, catching up with the good stuff is hard. You should read hundred of less than interesting posts to get the important ones.
Improving the search on Planet MySQL helps a lot. But it won’t let you easily find an article that was published in a blog that is not aggregated, because the author writes about MySQL only once in a while. And the planet won’t let you find the presentations about interesting stuff, unless the accompanying text and tags reflect your search query.

The Librarian changes it all. The good content from conferences, stray presentations, videos, articles, can all be referenced in one place.
We started planning this tool in November 2008. Its implementation required a radical change of the Planet MySQL code, with months of thankless work to refactoring the existing features with a more flexible infrastructure. The small visible changes that appeared on Planet MySQL from February to June 2009 are the tip of the iceberg of a huge code change (kudos to Dups, who had the vision and the perseverance to tackle the task). If you were wondering why planetmysql.org started redirecting to planet.mysql.com, here’s the reason. We needed a single login, which could only be achieved by taking the planet under the main domain.

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