Perl's extremely flexible syntax makes it easy to write code that is harder to read and maintain than it could be. This article describes some very basic practices for a clear and concise style of writing Perl. It has even a link to the Perl design patterns wiki.
It's december again, which means there's a new Perl advent calendar.
Boy, do I hate date calculations. Gregorian dates are so cumbersome to calculate, I mostly switch to Julian dates to work with. Even with the Perl Date::Calc module I really hate those calculations...
I noticed that someone implemented a Perl module to convert Gregorian dates to Tolkien's Shire date system. The Date::Tolkien::Shire module converts dates into the Shire Calender as presented in the Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. It includes converting epoch time to the Shire Calendar (you can also get epoch time back), comparison operators, and a method to print a formatted string containing that does something to the effect of on this date in history -- pulling events from the Lord of the Rings.
It seems that the third beta version of DarkChannels is the good one : for some days now, I'm testdriving this version, and everything behaves nicely. In this last version, I have added timestamp support, which basically means that websites which do not carry the Last-Modified HTTP header (eg many PHP based sites), still get a timestamp in DarkChannels if they provide new information. In the past versions, such websites did not get such a timestamp, and ended up on the bottom of the list. Now, the left column has a nice chronological overview of all modified sites.
I'm going to introduce quite some modifications in the DC-0.6.0 package, as not all files are located in the place they should be : the sites file is basically a configuration file, so it should end up in /etc, and not in the current /usr/lib/darkchannels. That way, the Debian package should also be lintian clean. I'm going to carry out some more tests, and if everything turns out to be A-Ok, I''ll start the packaging.
It seems that a new XULChannels might still be far away, as Tim stated, so he ended up playing with Planet Planet, to create PlanetBlog, a collection of Dutch and Flemmish blogs.
DarkChannels 0.5.0 has been released. I ran into too many problems with the XML::Simple implementation, which the previous module handled so nicely for me. So I restored the XML::RSS::Parser::Lite module, but adapted it so it is capable of parsing RDF feeds. I sent the patch to the module author, and hope he will apply it.
What's even more, you can download the source, and install DarkChannels on your own webserver. The source has been released under the GPL - if you have any remarks, bugreports, or wishlists, please send them to me.
I have released DarkChannels 0.4.9, which is an alfa release of 0.5.0. This version supports all RSS versions, which was the last thing that bugged me in DarkChannels. To accomplish this, I needed to replace the XML::RSS:Parser::Lite Perl module by something other : I first tried XML::Twig, but the API seemed too complex, and I switched to XML::Simple instead. This meant replacing the core of the DarkChannels engine, so expect things to break from time to time in the next days.
I suffer from a heavy outbreak of hernia, so this version is mainly coded under the influence of strong painkillers - hence the release name (and another reason to call this an alfa release ;)
DarkChannels 0.4.2 has been released; it contains a bugfix where the script continues to operate even if one of the sites is down. The previous version bailed out when one of the listed sites was unavailable, a phenomenon that occurred too frequently, now that the list of sites continues to grow.
I'm starting to code on DarkChannels 0.5.0, which should support every version of RSS, and for which I will make the source available for download under the GPL.
Some minor modifications lead to DarkChannels 0.4.1. I still want to clean up the code a bit, and make some improvements to the layout in IE browsers, so 0.4.2 might not be far away. Note that the Perl module I use to extract the information from the RSS feed is apparently limited to RSS version 0.91 or lower, so for technical reasons a submitted link might not be included (so don't take it personally if the link you submitted, doesn't show up ;)
I have released DarkChannels 0.4.0. From now on, you can submit your own RSS feeds you would like to see included. They will be reviewed, and if suited, included in the RSS list. With this release, nearly all the functionality of the former XULchannels has been implemented.
I have released DarkChannels 0.3.0, which contains the following modifications :