Olaf Alders

• Website: www.wundercounter.com
• About: I hack on iCPAN, MetaCPAN and other fun stuff.

Recent Actions

• Commented on Sifting Through the CPAN
  It was pointed out to me that I should have mentioned in my original post that Task::Kensho also has some valuable data for folks looking to find the right module for a given task....
• Commented on Sifting Through the CPAN
  As far as PrePAN goes, that's maybe the subject of a blog post in itself, but essentially you have a forum dedicated to discussing your module that is social, not tied to an email thread and has a dedicated URL...
• Commented on Encouraging bloggers to use the 'extended' feature
  How is an ad hominem helpful here?...
• Commented on Idea: perl community homepage
  I think this is probably a bit beyond the scope of metacpan.org as it stands right now, but it's a perfect use case for the MetaCPAN API. I'd like to see this get done and am happy to help where...
• Commented on What's wrong with CPAN?
  Not a stretch at all. That's a feature request that would belong in metacpan-web. :)...
• Commented on The CPAN Unknown Usage problem
  Some of this could be solved with tags and as far as the concept of following goes, we could also put together a newsfeed, which is maybe a bit like what you see on your Github page. So, you'd see...
• Commented on A couple of ideas for improving commenting/reviewing CPAN modules
  If there were a cpanratings API, we would love to integrate it with MetaCPAN....
• Posted Sifting Through the CPAN to Olaf Alders

  Some interesting stuff has been said today on The Four Major Problems with CPAN, Don't release…

• Commented on Pumpkin Perl - Redux
  I'm glad you've taken the time to reframe the debate here and bring it back to solving one specific problem rather than "well, if we do x then we have to do y, z etc as well". Fixing a problem...
• Commented on PAUSE permissions should be case-insensitive
  See also Dancer vs dancer (both provided by the same dist) and CGI vs cgi (different dists). It can indeed be very confusing....
• Commented on Perl 7
  I think there's some real value in the year-based versioning scheme. As you've said, looking at older Perls, it really isn't obvious how old the builds are solely by looking at the version numbers. I know I don't have that...
• Commented on Installing all CPAN modules
  There is Bundle::Everything, but it's a bit out of date and not complete anyway. It has a lot of stuff in it, though....
• Commented on A quick static file webserver
  Very nice! If you want a ready-made solution, you can also do something like this with http_this, which I find myself doing a lot, actually....
• Commented on 50% of the new CPAN uploads lack a repository link
  MetaCPAN was completely re-indexed before traffic was switched over to the new machine, so if you're querying the API you're essentially getting the same information this week as you would have gotten last week. :)...
• Posted MetaCPAN is Moving Today (Dec 31, 2012) to Olaf Alders

  This is just a quick note to let everyone know that MetaCPAN is moving to a new hosting sponsor today (Dec 31st). Our old hosting relationship with speedchilli.com has unfortunately come to an end. We've been quite grateful for and more than satisfied with…

• Commented on CPAN module recommendation system
  This looks really good. It has already pointed me towards App::p as a module I'd like to try out. :) I think there's stuff in here which would be great to incorporate into MetaCPAN at some point. It works really...
• Posted Have you added your Perl project to 24pullrequests.com? to Olaf Alders

  24pullrequests.com takes the spirit of the Advent coding calendar and puts a new spin on it. Try to send one pull request per day for the next 24 days and 24pullrequests.com will help you track your progress. At the time of writing, 1,224 devs have…

• Commented on Categorizing CPAN modules
  Module tagging is on the roadmap for MetaCPAN, but at this point it's still just a project in search of a volunteer....
• Commented on CPAN In The Sky With Diamonds
  Very nice. I'll be keeping an eye on this project....
• Commented on Map of CPAN - The Movie
  Great work. The music is a nice touch as well. :)...
• Posted Introducing HTTP::CookieMonster to Olaf Alders

  If you've ever had the pleasure of poking around in your WWW::Mechanize or LWP::UserAgent cookie_jar, you'll know it's not an entirely painless process. It's certainly not…

• Commented on To Be or Not To Be part of the community
  I quite like the way you expressed this. The example of not staring at people in public is, I think, a helpful way of looking at this....
• Commented on Thanks to Olaf Alders for HTTP::CookieMonster
  Awesome! So glad to hear you find it useful. :)...
• Commented on Elapsed Time in Test Output
  It would be great to have this on CPAN. I've recently had some tests occasionally taking way too much time, so something like this would have been quite handy....
• Commented on Using Plack::Middleware::CSRFBlock and jQuery to deal with Cross Site Request Forgery
  I think the issue with the server logs is the CSRF token appearing in a referring URL in *someone else's* server logs. Specifically the report says: "Sensitive information within URLs may be logged in various locations, including the user's browser,...
• Posted Using Plack::Middleware::CSRFBlock and jQuery to deal with Cross Site Request Forgery to Olaf Alders

  At $work, our flagship application was recently audited for potential security issues. One of the items which raised a red flag was the fact that we weren't dealing with the threat of CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery). The…

• Commented on How the YAPC::NA videos got on Youtube
  Thanks for going into such detail about this. I had briefly wondered if there were any legal issues with posting the videos, but my assumption was that people would generally just be grateful for access to the stuff. Glad to...
• Commented on Early set of YAPC::NA 2012 videos on Youtube
  Wow. That's lightning speed for getting the talks online and kudos for just getting it done. I'm very grateful for this as I missed a number of interesting talks because of scheduling etc. I'm sure there are others who attended...
• Posted iCPAN 2.0.0 now Available in the App Store to Olaf Alders

  I'm happy to announce that iCPAN 2.0.0 is now in the app store. If you're not familiar with it, iCPAN is a free iOS app which allows you to browse CPAN Pod on your iPhone/iPod/iPad. …

• Commented on I love Github
  I hate to admit it, but these days I'm pretty reluctant to submit patches to modules that aren't on Github. I'm pretty lazy and Github just makes it so easy to fork, edit, commit and send a pull request that...

Comment Threads

• Brian E. Lozier commented on Encouraging bloggers to use the 'extended' feature

  It sounds like your premise is that long posts on the main page are somehow bad. I like reading long posts inline without having to click each article and load a new page, what's the big deal? I recommend leaving it as it is.

• ugexe commented on Encouraging bloggers to use the 'extended' feature

  @brian e lozier: For one thing its especially painful if you browse on anything other than a computer.

• Neil Bowers commented on Encouraging bloggers to use the 'extended' feature

  If someone types "perl blog" into google, blogs.perl.org (BPO) is the top result. I think it would be a much better user experience if Joe Random Browser got a page of brief abstracts, rather than scads of code, config, data, etc.

  I follow BPO via a feed, but I still visit with a browser regularly, for example to comment, look at other comments, etc, and I think brief abstracts is a more user-friendly experience.

  As a bonus, if posts have an abstract, it's easier for readers to quickly decide whether they're going to read the article in full, or move on.

• mimosinnet commented on Idea: perl community homepage

  New to Perl and it looks great! Thanks!

• Neil Bowers commented on Idea: perl community homepage

  Thanks for the good comments and encouragement — I'd better get on with it! Current working name is theperlhub.com, but suggestions for a better name (with .{org,com} available) gratefully received). I'll play around with the prototype while thinking about design / approach for the real thing.

  Catalyst, Dancer, Mojolicious, or OX ... ?