Barbie

I've just released new versions of my use.perl distributions, WWW-UsePerl-Journal and WWW-UsePerl-Journal-Thread. As use.perl became decommisioned at the end of 2010, the distrubutions had been getting a lot of failure reports, as they used screen-scraping to get the content. As such, I had planned to put them out to pasture in BackPAN. That was until recently I discovered that Léon Brocard had not only released WWW-UsePerl-Server, but also provided a complete SQL archive of the use.perl database (see the POD for a link). Then combining the two, he put up a read-only version of the website.

While at YAPC::Europe this last week, I started tinkering, and fixing the URLs, regexes, logic and tests in my two distributions. Both distributions have had functionality removed, as the read-only site doesn't provide all the same features as the old dynamic site. The most obvious is that posting new journal entries is now disabled, but other lesser features not available are searching for comments based on thread id or users based on the user id. The majority of the main features are still there, and those that aren't I've used alternative methods to retrieve them where possible.

Although the distributions and modules are now working again, they're not perhaps as useful as they once were. As such, I will be looking to merge both distributions for a future release, and also providing support to a local database of the full archive from Léon.

Seeing as no-one else seems to have stepped forward and written similar modules for blogs.perl, I'm now thinking it might also be useful to take my use.perl modules and adapt them for blogs.perl. It might be a while before I finish them, but it'll be nice to have the ability to have many of the same features. I also note that blogs.perl.org also now has paging. Yeah \o/ :) This has been a feature that I have been wanting to see on the site since it started, so thanks to the guys for finding some tuits. There was a call at YAPC::Europe for people to help add even more functionality, so I look forward to seeing what delights we have in store next.