Reviving WWW::Shorten

Last July I wrote a post threatening to cull some of my unused CPAN modules. Some people made sensible comments and I never got round to removing the modules (and I’m no longer planning to) but I marked the modules in question as “HANDOFF” and waited for the rush of volunteers.

As predicted in my previous post, I wasn’t overwhelmed by the interest, but this week I got an email from Chase Whitener offering to take over maintenance of my WWW::Shorten modules. I think the WWW::Shorten modules are a great idea, but (as I said in my previous post) the link-shortening industry moves very quickly and you would need to far more dedicated than I am in order to keep up with it. All too often I’d start getting failures for a module and, on investigation, discover that another link-shortening service had closed down.

So I was happy to hand over my modules to Chase. And in the week or so since he’s taken them over he’s been more proactive than I’ve been in the last five years.

• He’s set up a p5-shorten organisation on Github to control the repos for all of the modules (all of my repos are now forks from those repos).
• He has started cleaning up all of the individual modules so that they are all a lot more similar than they have previously been.
• He has improved the documentation.
• He has started to release new versions of some of the modules to CPAN.

All stuff that I’ve been promising myself that I’d get round to doing – for about the last five years. So I’m really grateful that the project seems to have been given the shot in the arm that I never had the time to give it. Thanks to Chase for taking it on.

Looking at CPAN while writing this post, I see that there are two pages of modules in the WWW::Shorten namespace – and only about 20% of them are modules that I wrote or inherited from SPOON. It’s great to see so many modules based on my work. However, I have no idea how many of them still work (services close down, HTML changes – breaking web scrapers). It would be great if the authors could all work together to share best practice on keeping up with this fast-moving industry. Perhaps the p5-shorten Github organisation would be a good place to do that.

Anyway, that’s seven fewer distributions that I own on CPAN. And that makes me happy. Many thanks to Chase for taking them on.

Now. Who wants Guardian::OpenPlatform::API, Net::Backpack or the AudioFile::Info modules?

Also published on Medium.