Keeping updated with the community
When just registering to use.perl.org, I started using RSS feeds. Currently I have roughly 25 or so subscriptions, which is lightweight, I know. Mostly are specific Perl programmers (mst, nothingmuch, elliotjs, dagolden, drolsky), some are aggregators, a few friends' personal/political blogs, etc.
Work-wise, the best feed I've had was the "use.perl.org generated feeds", which shows me on a daily basis which modules/distros were released. It helps me by:
- Keeping me up to date with modules I use.
- Keeping me up to date with modules I want to use.
- Keeping me up to date with modules I intend to use (once they go stable).
- Keeping me up to date with modules I don't even know that could benefit my work.
Of course, a nice feature is that when I mouse over the link, I can see the path and it points to the author as well, and if I recognize their handle (which I do for a lot of major CPAN authors), I can notice a module that is developed by a major (or beloved) CPAN author, which means I should take special care for this, because it might be more worthwhile than it seems.
Today (roughly 10 minutes ago), I noticed the feed hasn't been working since Dec 15!!
Yes, it's amazing (or incredibly stupid) that I hadn't noticed it till now, since I use it so often. a More logical explanation would be that "we don't notice how important things are until they aren't there anymore".
I'm writing this to emphasize how important it is for a Perl programmer to be in-tuned as much as s/he can with the community. It leverages your work, it helps you keep up to date with latest technologies available to you, it helps you learn, advance, mature, progress and understand more than you ever will on your own.
I checked the details of the feed and I can see there's a parsing error. Going to the link, it now points to main use.Perl.org instead of providing the feed. If I go to http://use.perl.org/modulelist.rss using Firefox, I can clearly see that the text doesn't have proper line breaks. This is something I've noticed in all use.perl.org announcements about a new Perl version. I can also see the last update is from Dec 30, 5 days late.
The main CPAN feed is per-module which is.. to say, tiresome.
Does anyone have a proper feed for this, on a daily basis, updated daily, with correct line breaks?
Gots to do the bloggingz
Is there a reason why http://search.cpan.org/uploads.rdf won't do?
Yes, there is. It serves one msg for each upload. I use an RSS reader (specifically Google Reader), in which so many small single msgs are not comfortable to read.
I much prefer to get a daily digest of "Today's module uploads" in a single msg.