Perl

Isn't the Perl advent calendar cool ? One of the entries pointed to an article on O'Reilly.net about hacking some RSS spiders, which is what DarkChannels exactly is. It mentions the Perl modules Template::Extract and XML::RSS::Parser::Lite, which you can use to create your own RSS agregator. I certainly recommend Template::Extract, which is very usefull if you have complex datafiles from which you have to get your information.

Yesterday evening, I rewrote DarkChannels completely in Perl, so I could finally ditch the crappy shellscript I used to fetch the RSS feeds. So for now, DarkChannels 0.2 is just the same car, but with a different - and better - engine. Version 0.3 is already being coded, and will contain more functional enhancements.

As it is the habit these times, there's yet again a new Perl advent calendar with various usefull Perl tips & code snipplets.

I have made a feeble attempt to rewrite the dying XULchannels in Perl. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my own news aggregator, DarkChannels v0.1.0 (alpha release). It contains some sites I visit frequently, and -just for now- only gets updated once a day.

I'm enrolled at work in some weeks of heavy Perl coding. But once I'm busy coding, it's hard to stop myself : I have written my own version of the dying XULChannels, called DarkChannels. And I've Perlified the shellscript that I use to generate this site from a local PHPNuke engine.

We the unwilling,
led by the unknowing,
are doing the impossible
for the ungrateful.

One of the highlights of every OSCON is Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion address, covering Perl, philosophy, linguistics, music, theology, science, and usually funny other things thrown in for good measure. These are the thoughts of the man behind perl. (This explains a *lot* about perl. ;)

"Shlomi, it takes 10 years to learn UNIX. I want you to learn it in a month". That were the words of Shlomi Fishs new supervisor, and Shlomi went out to learn. And soon he discovered Perl, and its mighty ability to do almost everything. He even wrote a book about it.