Olaf Alders

August was another busy month for MetaCPAN, so I think a recap is in order. I'll proceed chronologically.

2011-08-01

Gabor Szabo included MetaCPAN in his first issue of the Perl Weekly. It's an excellent aggregation of all Perl things blog and newsworthy. I can tell you just from the time involved in a MetaCPAN recap that Gabor is spending a huge amount of time on his weekly newsletters. I follow a lot of blog posts, but I find his weekly recap helps me find interesting stuff I may have missed.

2011-08-03

Have you every blown away a lot of data you didn't have a backup for? I know I have. It was client data and it was ugly. A lot of us have been there and precisely this happened to MetaCPAN. In our rush to get cool features online, we put off taking snapshots of all the cool data Perl hackers were adding to the system. On this particular day, it came back to bite us. So, what was effectively a hard reset forced us to re-evaluate, re-index and put a proper backup strategy in effect. You could say our new slogan is "The New MetaCPAN: Now with Backups!".

If you added any info (author or +1) before Aug 3 and haven't logged in since, you'll need to clear your MetaCPAN cookies, reauthenticate and start from scratch. It's sub-optimal, to be sure, but lessons have been learned, more hard disks have been installed and we're working on sponsorship to get a second server online which we can fail over to.

2011-08-04

There had been some complaints about not being able to diff on MetaCPAN, so on Aug 4th Mo put a little something together to do just that. It looks great, works well and may have been some small compensation for the events of the previous day. :)

On the same day RJBS announced that his advent calendars now link to MetaCPAN rather than search.cpan.org!

2011-08-08

On this day SARTAK added wishlist functionality to MetaCPAN. If you find the PayPal button too mercenary, you may appreciate the wishlist as a way of letting others thank you for your hard work. Log in to add this to your author profiles.

2011-08-10

On this day YANICK added klout.com to the author profiles.

2011-08-16

On this day AYOUNG added Ohloh.net to author profiles and I added github-meets-cpan.com to the profiles as well.

2011-08-17

On this date mo gave a MetaCPAN lightning talk at YAPC::EU, complete with impressive graphics.

2011-08-18

On this day DOHERTY rebranded the +1 to ++ to make it more Perlish and less Googlesque.

2011-08-19

This date marks the intial Github commit of wata's excellent CPANHelper Chrome helper extension. I've been making use of this extension every day and I can tell you it's very cool. I highly recommend it. Install it now.

On this date I also became aware that TOKUHIROM is slated to give a MetaCPAN talk at YAPC::ASIA. Kudos to him for submitting the proposal. He has done a lot of work with the API and I hope he posts his slides. :)

2011-08-22

Around this date, I added links to Changelogs on MetaCPAN at the release level. This was a much-requested feature.

2011-08-23

On this date Mo added "reverse dependency" listings.

2011-08-24

VTI came up with another gem on Aug 24th. PerlResume.org is an excellent example of the kind of cool stuff you can do with the MetaCPAN API. Look yourself up and see how your Perl Résumé stacks up against those of other authors.

2011-08-29

Around this time I became aware of the fact that p3rl.org now points at MetaCPAN. Try it: http://p3rl.org/shit

August also marks the wrap-up for Mo's Google Summer of Code project, which was a huge success. Over the coming weeks we'll be putting a road map together, to make plans for going forward without the same GSoC resources at our disposal. We've got a really solid foundation to work on going forward, so we're feeling quite good about how the project is progressing.

In other news, we're working to bring a new sponsor on board this week and I'll have an update on that once that has been set up.

My apologies to any contributions I may have inadvertently missed in this roundup. It wasn't intentional.

If you'd like to get involved, stop by #metacpan in irc.perl.org, follow us on Twitter or just comment on this post.