Blog posts are like busses. You wait months for one and then two come along on consecutive days!

Yesterday I wrote about how we didn’t need a blogging platform for the Perl community – all we really needed was a good-looking feed aggregator. I mentioned Perlsphere as one such aggregator.

Then Matthew commented, saying that Perlsphere looked a bit broken as Dave Cantrell’s posts from a few years ago frequently pop up there as new posts. I had a quick look at the problem and couldn’t quite work out what was going on. His web feed seems valid, but Perlsphere didn’t seem to recognise the dates of the posts.

Perlsphere is implemented using Plagger, a feed aggregator written by Miyagawa a very long time ago (back when it seemed that web feeds were going to conquer the world). It’s a pretty complex beast and it seemed possible that somewhere deep in its code, it was mis-parsing Dave’s web feed. So I cloned the repo and tried to work out what was going on.

But Plagger hasn’t been updated for a very long time. As you can see from the test results, it stopped passing its tests a long while ago (I suspect when the current directory was removed from @INC). I spent a brief time trying to get it working but, ultimately, decided it was too hard a job.

So I took another look at Perlsphere. And I decided that if it’s based on bit-rotten software, it’s not going to be very easy to maintain (which gave me flashbacks to blogs.perl.org!)

But there’s another Perl tool for aggregating web feeds. And I wrote it. It’s called Perlanet (and, boy, do I regret that name now). Back in the first decade of this millennium, I was fascinated by web feeds and the idea of using them to build local “planets” – a web site that aggregated web feeds that had interesting information about your local area. Of course, that was back in the days when everything had a web feed and it was simple enough to pull them together and create really quite interesting sites. These days, of course, web feeds are rather unfashionable and almost no-one thinks to add them on to their web site.

However, they still cling to life in the world of blogging. Mainly, I suspect, because blogging platforms added them fifteen years ago and just haven’t bothered to remove them yet. And it’s blog posts that we’re interested in here – so we’re still in with a chance of building something useful.

And that’s what I did over lunch. I give you Planet Perl, a new site for aggregating Perl blogs.

Currently, it only has four blogs in the configuration. But the config file is on Github and I’ll be happy to get pull requests adding other blogs.

I hope you find it useful.