Report for January 2013

Last year, I wrote monthly TODO lists, and reports of my online accomplishments. Well, I wrote them sometime. This year, I have not even written a New Year's Resolution as it was so unclear what was the correlation between my plans for 2012 and my actual results.

So let's write just results.

(Yes, I know, it is bit late for the January report, but better late than...)

January 2013 report

• 11 articles on Perl 5 Maven
• 3 articles on blogs.perl.org
• 3 articles on szabgab.com

A toal of 17 articles.

The Unique visitor count on the Perl 5 Maven site went from 14,275 in December 2012, to 21,707 in January 2013. (That's 52% growth though December is a relatively slow month due to the Holidays.) The visits count went from 17,815 in December 2012, to 27,799 in January 2013. The Returning visitors rate went up from 24.79% to 27.79%.

At the same time szabgab.com went from 6,913 unique visitors to 8,206. This surprised me a bit, as I thought it will decline, but maybe the effect of December is bigger than what I thought.

Beginner level

The following articles were part of the Perl Tutorial.

• Barewords in Perl
• Core Perl documentation and CPAN module documentation
• Download and install Perl
• Perl on the command line
• undef, the initial value and the defined function of Perl
• Automatic string to number conversion or casting in Perl
• Open and read from text files

META::CPAN related articles

There were several articles on how to fetch data from Meta CPAN via its API and how to configure the CPAN modules so they - or rather their META files - provide some of the information.

• How to convince Meta CPAN to show a link to the version control system of a distribution?
• List all the Perl modules and distributions in a name-space using Meta CPAN
• Fetching META data from Meta CPAN
• The license and the repository of Perl modules on CPAN
• 50% of the new CPAN uploads lack a repository link

Perl and Windows

While for me personally Windows is only a secondary platform, I believe there are many people who use Windows who could use Perl solving some issues. For that it seems to be important to make sure most of the CPAN modules work on Windows as well.

• 13% of CPAN distributions don't have a test report on Windows
• AnyEvent::ForkManager stuck on Strawberry but not on ActivePerl?

General help

Someone asked me for help with parsing a log file. Here is the solution.

• Help with perl (parsing error log)

Community related

I was happy to see that this year too the Perl community was present at FOSDEM. Both with a dev-room and a booth.

• Perl at FOSDEM 2013 and the outreach

Other

A solution with Unix/Linux Shell and a bit of Perl.

• Fetching the status of blog entries using grep and cut

Trainings

I had 3 on-site training days running a Beginner Perl Maven course.

Plans for February 2013

JFDI