Planet CPAN

Recently I have been enjoying Iron Man blog posts that talk about some particular CPAN module like HTML::FormHandler, Finance::Quote, Term::ProgressBar, local::lib, Log::Log4perl, Dist::Zilla, even the good ol' Digest::MD5.

I'm hoping though that even more people (authors and users alike) would blog more about CPAN modules, because although we arguably have one of the richest sets of interfaces to our wonderful software library, with more than 16000 modules it's near impossible to browse them all. Feature blog posts certainly help people stumble on interesting stuffs even if they don't follow Recent CPAN Uploads.

Since ~ 95% of all interesting things in the Perl world are happening inside CPAN (not to belittle the huge efforts of the p5p team or the Parrot & Perl 6 designers/implementors, of course) shouldn't we be blogging more about it?

Filtering RSS

On a somewhat unrelated note, lately I've also been tired of all the Microsoft/Windows/Vista/7/8/9 that are filling up from the Slashdot RSS feed. Most are irrelevant to me as I use Linux, besides, those news are really minor/unimportant/of marketing type, like rereading old Vista reviews, intentionally ambiguous 128-bit version of future Windows, or repeated news items telling me that products are being delayed yet again. Who cares?

Nowadays I'm using Google Reader on a cellphone to read most feeds, so less junk would be nice. Google Reader doesn't have filtering yet, so I ended up using Yahoo! Pipes. Filtering and doing other stuffs to feeds (and other kinds of data like CSV) are surprisingly quick and easy using this web-based visual editor. A user-friendly Perl- and Unix-killer? :-) Just go to pipes.yahoo.com, click on My Pipes, create a new pipe, and do some drag-and-drops and text field filling, publish your pipe, and get RSS. Perfect (here are two examples of pipes I've created: slashdot-noms and slashdot-nofb). Looking forward to a more Microsoft-free news reading ahead.