March 2013 Archives

Encouraging bloggers to use the 'extended' feature

This is a collection of ideas for how we can encourage bloggers using blogs.perl.org to split their posts into an abstract and body. Attempts at education have largely failed, so I think we should try something else.

Idea: perl community homepage

One of my problems related to Perl is that I'm not aware of a lot of things going on in the perl world, and there isn't a single place I can go to try and keep up. I suspect I'm not the only one. This post outlines an idea for a "perl community home page", where you could go to "keep up". I've whipped up a prototype, which is just a static page with a mashup of various feeds and static data.

The CPAN Unknown Usage problem

To help CPAN authors keep track of who is using their modules, we could introduce two concepts: "follow module" and "I'm using this module". Both would be similar to the 'following' and +1 features found in nearly all social media services, and ++ in MetaCPAN.

What's wrong with CPAN?

This is an attempt to succinctly list all the different problems perceived with CPAN, and give them a name. No attempt at proposing solutions, or structuring a taxonomy / priority list, but data gathering.

Don't release experiments to CPAN

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.

CPAN modules that (can) load other modules

I've published a review of CPAN modules that (can) load other modules. I started making this list of modules when looking at modules for getting dependency information: one class of such modules parse code looking for things that signify a dependency, either implicitly or explicitly.

About Neil Bowers

user-pic Perl hacker since 1992.