Olaf Alders

Last week I posted an article on how CPAN authors could expand their profiles on metacpan.org. Since then there has been so much activity that I thought a quick recap would be in order. I'm not covering all activity, so my apologies to anyone whose efforts have not been replayed here.

At the time of the article, 91 authors had logged in to MetaCPAN and updated their profiles. That number after one week is 240. That's still a very small fraction of total CPAN authors, but it's also an amazing start.

On or just after the day of my post, Mo added +1 to metacpan.org. So, if you haven't already, log yourself in and start upvoting your favourite distributions. There will be more info on +1 to come, but this is a first step in making CPAN a friendlier place.

2 days after my post (July 22), Johannes Plunien announced github-meets-metacpan.com, which is a leaderboard of CPAN authors who are active on Github. It's a perfect example of how the MetaCPAN API can be used for fun and interesting mashups. My suspicion is that a good number of authors who have updated their info in the last week have done so specifically so that they would appear on github-meets-metacpan. It's a fun way to see where you "rank" according to other authors and it may well encourage more Perl activity on Github (and CPAN). I think it's great! (At the time of this writing the number of authors on the leaderboard is up to 180).

On the same day tokuhirom announced explorer.metacpan.org. This is another incredibly useful (and fun) app. The MetaCPAN explorer makes it easy for you to get started using the MetaCPAN API with basic PUT and more complex POST requests. I see this app eventually replacing much of the API documentation in the wiki. It's kind of like a jsfiddle for the MetaCPAN. It makes it easy to test and share queries. I've used it myself and I have to say that it's much much easier than putting together POST queries via curl at the command line.

On this same day, sartak showed how easy it can be to add new services to the MetaCPAN profile pages. You can do it in just a couple of minutes.

On the following day (July 23), miyagawa tweeted that the next release of cpanmninus will include MetaCPAN. The pull request in question was provided by the prolific tokuhirom.

Around this time, Torsten Raudsuss set up a MetaCPAN facebook page. Please feel free to "like" us so that you can be updated on the latest developments and easily let fellow Perl devs on facebook know about MetaCPAN.

On July 24, tokuhirom announced that he has submitted a MetaCPAN talk to YAPC::Asia. Excellent!

On this same day Sawyer X released a new version of MetaCPAN::API, which takes advantage of the latest version (v0) of the API. MetaCPAN::API makes it trivial to get started using MetaCPAN. I highly recommend it.

On July 25 Gabor Szabo published a MetaCPAN screencast to introduce the site and some of its features. This was unexpected but very welcome. The screencast now also has subtitles in both English and Russian. The code is available on Github for anyone who'd like to provide additional translations.

On the same day Johannes Plunien added more Github info to MetaCPAN. Now, if you hover over a Github "repository" link on a distribution page, info about the Github repo will be shown in a popup. Test it out on the Pithub page. Incredibly useful.

On July 26 MetaCPAN Growler was released by Hideaki Ohno. It "fetches MetaCPAN recent update modules and growls as new activies are coming in". This is particularly cool since MetaCPAN updates new releases in something closely resembling real time.

Today (July 28) Tim Bunce used his Devel-NYTProf to double the performance of the MetaCPAN indexer. As the indexer takes days to run, this is a huge boost.

Not every week is this fruitful, but more and more people are getting involved and things are happening quickly. I'd encourage you to stop by #metacpan on irc.perl.org or follow @metacpan on Twitter to stay on top of all of the latest happenings.