Well this is a bit embarrassing. My script to tell me the date of the first CPAN/PAUSE upload told me the 16th August, but somehow when writing the first post about it, I changed the date to the 14th. Doh.

The good news is that 16th August is a Saturday this year, which gives us all a better chance at uploading a release or two. And two more days to prepare.

I've updated the previous posts, and regenerated the charts.

The SEE ALSO section in your module's pod is where you direct the reader to other things of interest. In this post I'll briefly outline what constitutes a good SEE ALSO, and why it benefits you to create one.

My thoughts on this topic have evolved over time, and in writing this I've realised that a lot of my modules could do with a brush up. I'll be releasing those on CPAN Day, of course :-)

If the abstract for your module is up to snuff, then have a look at the SYNOPSIS to see whether you could improve that in a CPAN Day release. The SYNOPSIS should briefly show typical usage of the headline features of your module.

Here are some guidelines for a good SYNOPSIS:

If you're looking for something to release on CPAN day, check the abstract for your modules, and make sure they have a good abstract. The abstract should not only be compliant pod, but should succinctly describe what your module does. The name and abstract are often the first thing that potential users see, so make them count.

How many releases were done on previous CPAN Days? I know you've been dying to find out, so here are a few graphs, and I'll also compare with the top days in CPAN history. If 100 people each do one release on this coming CPAN Day (16th August, UTC), then it'd be the best CPAN Day yet. If between us we manager 151 releases, that would be the highest day ever.

CPAN and PAUSE record their timestamps in UTC, as all sane systems do. So if you're planning to release on CPAN, please take that into consideration.

Celebrate the inauguration of CPAN on the 16th August by doing something related to CPAN: release something, blog about your favourite module, or email its author thanking her or him.

The Perl community on gittip has 499 members right now (Wednesday morning, GMT). Who will be the 500th member? It could be you!

Jerome Eteve was the 500th member! Jerome is the author of Alien::ImageMagick, and more.

Does anyone fancy writing a Dist::Zilla plugin that would read a Changes file in YAML and munge it to one in the CPAN::Changes::Spec format?

I'm proposing an explicit community convention where experimental code isn't released to CPAN, but is shared on github, perhaps with an associated blog post, or discussion on PrePAN.

This addresses just one of CPAN's problems, which have also been raised today by Brendan Byrd.

The other day Andy Lester posed a question Where can someone find Perl modules to contribute to? My first answer was to look at the dists with the most bugs. I continued thinking about it, wondering how you could identify a module that is ripe for help.

This post outlines my next idea, and the top 20 dists based on my first implementation.