Starting from today, you can sign in to Play Perl using email, even if you don't have a twitter account. (It won't ask you for password; it uses Mozilla Persona.)

Quick recap: Play Perl is a new social and gamified website for Perl developers, where people can declare their open source plans and get points for completing them. I launched it 2 weeks ago.

This week was much slower than the last, due to me being back to my daily job from vacation. Still, I managed to get more than a 100 commits in, including:

• the ability to unclaim quests, moving them into a global "up-for-grabs" pool
• the ability to abandon quests without removing them
• RSS for the global news feed
• 4 separate explore sub-tabs
• performance optimizations
• many refactorings, html improvements, bugfixes and new bugs, as usual

Also, thanks to the awesome creaktive@, Play Perl got a favicon. And then, thanks to the awesome neilb@, it got another one :)

Sorry for the eye-catchy title, but seriously, number of Play Perl quests created in 1 week since its launch:

$ curl -s 'http://play-perl.org/api/quest' | jq length
197

rt.cpan.org tickets created after 2013-02-07: 128 (no idea how to add a permanent link to its search results).

Some other stats:

• 282 players
• 200 comments
• 309 likes
• 1,349 unique visitors
• 28,222 page views (half of them are probably mine)

New features since my last post:

• Email notifications (if you have registered in the first few days, go to your settings and set your email!)
• New Explore tab
• Players list is now the leaderboard
• Comments preview with client-side markdown engine
• Comments and quests editing
• Auto-highlighting CPAN module names in comments
• "Like" button in quest lists

Several people wrote some really nice posts about Play Perl. Go read them if you haven't already, they explain better why Play Perl is important than I do, with my non-native crude English writing skills :)

So, what's next?
I think most important features to add next are:

• the ability to add a quest directly to some kind of a quest pool (without taking on them personally and immediately);
• the ability to join someone on a quest;
• the ability to abandon a quest, to pick up an abandoned quest, and generally move them between different states.

After all that, I'd love to finally get to the fun part: pre-scripted quests, especially for newbies (Example: "Pass a tutorial at perltuts.com"; another example: "Solve 10 new Project Euler problems in Perl and publish them online"). I want to get at least one example of such pre-scripted quest implemented and see how it will work out in practice.
And then after that, achievements.

Summing up: you guys are awesome, I didn't expect it to be so popular.
Now go and play some more :)
And don't forget that the final objective is to complete your quests and not just add them!

PS: I need help with desigining a small Perl Raptor icon. Anyone?

This is fun. Maybe even too much fun, I didn't get enough sleep last night :)
Hacking on a live website with real users is so much more interesting than developing it in a local sandbox.
(I'm developing and supporting a big website with >1M hits/day at my daily $job, but somehow it's just not the same.)

In the last 24 hours, I implemented:

• open quests counter in /players list
• News Feed with opened/closed quests and new comments
• likes and comments counter in the quest list
• several bugfixes and html/css improvements

The power of likes

play-perl.org is up.
It's a very, very early alpha. There are no achievements, no news feed (Upd: news feed is in), no pre-set quests, not enough quest metadata and almost no introductory texts.
Still, I chose to release what I have now, because I want to start dog-fooding it myself, and because I want to see if anyone will care enough to try it.
(Also, my self-inflicted deadline was February 1st; I wanted to launch it with more features, but other projects and procrastination got in the way, as usual.)

With that being said, here's what already works: