http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=76228

In many posts monks have sung the praises of using CPAN modules when possible, and I usually echo each song. A while back I started making the recent uploads page on CPAN a staple in my daily surfing, and found it to be a great way to find out about new modules and get quick updates on modules I already use. It wouldn't be that hard to fill up Cool Uses for Perl every day with a CPAN module.

Keeping up to date on CPAN modules has been great because there are plenty of modules out there that I wouldn't have dreamed there'd already be a solution for in a CPAN module, and probably would have never searched. Even if I would have tried a search, unfortunately there are a lot of modules on CPAN that aren't very well named, and finding them in a search might prove a bit difficult.

Yesterday a co-worker was doing searches on Google to match a list of company names to their websites. I thought about it a while and remembered seeing WWW::Search on the list recently and in about 15 minutes was able to install it, scan the docs, and write a small script to save my co-worker some time. It was pretty rewarding.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? Are there other good ways besides this site and mailing lists to keep abreast of Perl development?

I also wanted to encourage people who are new to Perl or new to using CPAN modules to take a look at the recent uploads from time to time--it may save you some headaches that you wouldn't know could be solved. Even if you don't ever use a CPAN module, it's also a great way to see what other people are doing in Perl, and may give you some ideas on how to improve your skills.

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Re: CPAN Recent, Savior
by princepawn (Parson) on Apr 27, 2001 at 23:35 UTC
    There is an alternative search engine to CPAN for which a CPAN-weekly mailing list has been setup. We are beta-testing it right now.

    You can email the maintainer of the website and beta-test along with us!

    Alternatively, here is a "perl" script which you can put in your cron and get a weekly text/plain email of cpan.org/RECENT.html. I quoted Perl above because I am leveraging both mail and lynx and external technologies instead of writing a Pure perl script.

    #!/usr/bin/perl $ENV{TERM}='vt100'; $recent_file='/tmp/RECENT.txt'; $email_file='/tmp/ARRIVALS.txt'; $email_recipient_list='princepawn@yahoo.com'; system "lynx -dump http://www.cpan.org/RECENT.html > $recent_file"; open T, $recent_file; while (<T>) { /(authors.*readme$)/ && push @readme, $1; } `echo "" > $email_file`; for $readme (sort @readme) { my $url = "http://www.cpan.org/$readme"; warn $url; system "lynx -dump $url > X"; system "echo $url >>$email_file"; system "head -5 X >>$email_file"; system "echo >>$email_file; echo >>$email_file"; } `cat $email_file | mail $email_recipient_list`;