Map of CPAN - The Movie

poster.pngIf you've visited the Map of CPAN more than once, you'll notice that it has changed quite significantly over time. Coloured namespace areas expand as new distributions are uploaded and this expansion pushes other namespaces around - producing a kind of continental drift.

I thought it might be interesting to assemble a stop-motion animation of these changes. The result is: Map of CPAN – The Movie.

As with the static map, the colours don't really have any meaning beyond grouping together modules that share a namespace. The colours have even less meaning in the animation since I've used a static namespace-to-colour mapping which doesn't change as the areas move.

If you look closely you'll see little dark blue squares flashing by. Each flash represents the upload of a new distribution (i.e.: not a new release of an existing distribution).

3 Comments

This is great. It's fun watching a namespace "crawl around" — eg watch PDF.

I'm a sucker for this sort of data: how about showing some static data as well (at the end?), such as top ten fastest growing namespaces?

Very Cool!

Great work. The music is a nice touch as well. :)

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About Grant McLean

user-pic Perl hacker since 1995. Coordinator of Wellington.pm in New Zealand.