I recently gave a talk at AmsterdamX.pm about web scraping. I provided a few examples of scraping (most of them on my Github repo), and amongst them, a few relating to the January assignments page Neil has put up.

In the previous post I discussed my January Pull Request Challenge contribution. It's only part 1 because there's another part: the contributions others made during their PRC which were related to projects I'm in charge of.

While I was focused on the social aspects of the PR Challenge, such as the IRC channel (opping literally everyone), the guides (wrote several), the repo (plus organization), and lately even a small parser for the web page Neil created (which will appear in another post), I still had my own responsibilities - mainly, my own PR challenge, and taking care of others' PR challenge contributions that fell under my purview.

On my quest for downloading more podcasts, I decided to tackle another podcast I started listening to, Criminal.

This posed a set of new problems, and I'm going to go over the code for solving it, since I'm actually somewhat proud of it.

I started getting into podcasts recently and one that I heard mentioned a few times was Welcome to Night Vale. I didn't get to listen to it yet, but decided I'll try it out.

When I start with a podcast, I want to download the episodes. I don't listen on my computer, I listen on my mp3 player. (Yes, I still havhttp://commonplacebooks.com/welcome-to-night-vale/e one, and no, it's not an iPod.)

At the same time, I'm sick of going over lists of pages, opening each, and then looking for the download button, so I wrote a Perl script that downloads all episodes for this podcast.

A new Dancer2 release is heading to CPAN as we speak.

Christmas threw us off a bit on timing but we're back on track this week with our weekly Dancer2 release.

The CPAN PR Challenge is starting today. Latest polls have settled on 195 participants. People of all shapes and forms with different levels of Perl familiarity, experience, knowledge, and skill. Everyone seems excited and geared towards the challenge!

If you're participating, you might want to make use of the resources made available. I've tried to collect them here.