This is a story of one of those nice incidents where something starts off simple, then spirals out of control for a while but, in the end, everyone wins.

On Reddit, a few days ago, someone asked ‘Is there a “Planet Perl” with an RSS feed?’ and a few people replied, pointing out the existence of Planet Perl (which is the first Google result for “Planet Perl”). I’m obviously not marketing that site very well as every time I mention it, I get people (pleasantly) surprised that it exists.

On this occasion, it was Elvin Aslanov who seemed to discover my site for the first time. And, very soon afterwards, he started sending pull requests to add feeds to the site. As a result, we now have three more feeds that are being pulled into the site.

• Perl on Medium. I’m slightly embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of this myself. I did, after all, once try to start a Perl publication on Medium. I think I must have decided that there are better sites for technical blogging and blanked it from consideration. Medium’s not the busiest of places for Perl bloggers, but there are a few posts there and they’re mostly from people who are outside of the echo chamber – so getting more eyes on their posts is a good idea.
• Perl questions on Stack Overflow. Another one that would have been obvious if I had thought for a second. I’ve been answering questions on SO for years. It’s a good way to get more perspective on how Perl is being used across the industry. Unfortunately, the feed only includes the titles of the posts – you’ll need to click the link to actually see the question.
• Perl commits on GitHub. I’m interested in hearing how useful people think this is. I worry slightly that there will be times when the number of commits will overwhelm the other feeds. But maybe that’s a good idea. Perhaps it’s good for more people to see just how busy the Perl 5 Porters are. I’m a bit annoyed that the feed puts everything in a fixed-width font, but not (yet) annoyed enough to do anything about it.

You might know that Planet Perl is driven by Perlanet. So adding new feeds is just a case of adding a few lines to a configuration file. And looking at the pull requests I got from Elvin, showed a potential problem in the way the configuration was laid out. Each feed has three lines of YAML configuration. There’s a title for the feed, a URL for a web page that displays the content of the feed and the URL for the feed itself. They’re called “title”, “web” and “url”. And it’s that last name that’s slightly problematic – it’s just not clear enough. Elvin got “web” and “url” muddled up in one of his PRs and, when I pointed that out to him, he suggested that renaming “url” to “feed” would make things much clearer.

I agreed, and the next day I hacked away for a while before releasing version 3.0.0 of Perlanet. In this version, the “url” key is renamed to “feed”. It still accepts the old name (so older config files will still work) but you’ll get a warning if you try to use a config name in the old config.

I didn’t stop there. Last year, I wrote a blog post about producing a docker image that already had Perlanet installed – so that it was quicker to rebuild my various planets every few hours. Since then I’ve been rebuilding that image every time I updated Perlanet. But it’s been rather a manual process. And because I’m old and decrepit, I can never remember the steps I go through to rebuild it, tag it correctly and push it to the Docker Hub. This means it always takes far longer than it’s supposed to. So this time, I wrote a script to do that for me. And because I now have the kind of mind set that sees GitHub Workflows everywhere I look, I wrote a Workflow definition that builds and publishes the image any time the Dockerfile changes. I guess the next step will be to write an action that automatically updates the Dockerfile (thereby triggering the rebuild) each time I release a new version of Perlanet.

But that’s a problem for another day. For now, I’m happy with the improvements I’ve made to Planet Perl, Perlanet and the Perlanet Docker infrastructure.