Accidentally Building a CPAN Web Platform

An Accidental CPAN Web Platform

Sometimes you design a system. And sometimes you make a series of vaguely related decisions over five years and eventually realise that, quite by accident, you’ve designed a system. I think I’ve just done the latter. Back in February 2021, Gabor Szabo wrote an article called Perl modules with their own web sites. He pointed […]

How One Pull Request Took App::HTTPThis to Version 1.0

I *heart* http_this

Back in January I wrote about App::HTTPThis, the tiny web server I seem to reach for whenever I need to share the contents of a directory over HTTP. It’s a deliberately simple tool, wrapping Plack::App::DirectoryIndex in a command-line interface that gets out of your way. This week, thanks to a blog post from Olaf Alders, […]

Writing a TOON Module for Perl

Writing a TOON Module for Perl

Every so often, a new data serialisation format appears and people get excited about it. Recently, one of those formats is **TOON** — Token-Oriented Object Notation. As the name suggests, it’s another way of representing the same kinds of data structures that you’d normally store in JSON or YAML: hashes, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans and […]

Reformating images with App::BlurFill

An example of a processed image

You might know that I publish books about Perl at Perl School. What you might now know is that I also publish more general technical books at Clapham Technical Press. If you scroll down to the bottom of that page, you’ll see a list of the books that I’ve published. You’ll also see evidence of […]

Cleaner web feed aggregation with App::FeedDeduplicator

Dave working

I write blog posts in a number of different places: Davblog has been my general blog for about twenty years Perl Hacks is where I write about Perl My Substack newsletter is mostly tech stuff but can also wander into entrepreneurship and other topics And most of those posts get syndicated to other places: Tech stuff will […]