I confess, I've been searching for perl signals in the blogosphere. I was prompted by various talk that perl was falling out of fashion, not used, etc.pp.
In my own, rather arbitrary definition, Perl signals are:
People talking about actually using Perl to solve real world problems.
People asking questions about how to solve real world problems with Perl.
Perl newcomers, or Perl-is-just-a-scripting-language users, who haven't found the echo chamber yet.
This generally means, I'm specifically looking for Perl use outside of the Perl echo chamber. I'm hunting mostly for blogs and other places of posting, that are not inside the usual Perl-typical set of sites.
I first pondered where I might find people talking about Perl, outside the echo chamber. The easiest to search seemed to be mass-blog engines such as Vox, WordPress, LiveJournal and My Opera. I grabbed a copy of Plagger from CPAN and started looking for docs.. Not that there are many. Eventually I found the example configurations (YAML, boo!), and miyagawa, and managed to munge together a configuration for a Perl Signals Aggregator. After a few frustrating days (well, evenings) I also wrote a custom feed which turns Operas "search blogs" feature into a feed, since it doesn't have one. (Anyone want that? Anyone care to tell me why it doesn't show up on the list of feeds the output lists? Odd.) I also added stackoverflow.com, since it's also not a perl-place, generally.
So then we have it, Perl Signals Aggregator.
I asked for more suggestions of blogging sites to pick, and wreis came up with Googles Blog Search which is also rather nifty. However it searches more than what I would consider blogs.. So I'm fetching the matches in the last 12 hours in order to get slightly better quality matches (or signals), I hope.
So that's the looking part wrapped up. The result isn't terribly pretty (it finds a fair bit of LJ junk, and things in not-english.
I've started (we'll see if/when I get bored), trying to pick out the ones that best match my criteria, and re-posting them on a Perl Signals tumblr feed.
A side effect of this that I hadn't thought of is, I've already responded to some of these perl newcomers posts, and been thanked for it. I wonder if they had a clue where I came from. I will continue to do so, I hope. That really does raise awareness and bring more people into the modern language of perl.
On my travels setting up this system, I came across Aristotles Breaking Out of the Perl Echo Chamber: A Call to Action. Only five months or so later, and it looks like its working, there are several well known (and no doubt a fair few lesser known) perl folks giving great answers to all sorts of perl questions on stackoverflow. So much so that I may remove them from my list.
If these are the signals, where's the noise? Well, I was thinking of categorising that as all the "perl folks talking to themselves" blogging in the echo chamber.. But that's not really fair, as a number of these also match my criteria, so I shall be watching them too. Also, I don't need to aggregate those, as they already exist on the Planet Perl aggregator.. On the other hand, not all perl blogs are on there so.. Perl Noise Aggregator - need more feeds for this one..
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Last modified: 2012-01-31T03:25:07