Off the Top: Perl Entries
Summary of Installed Perl modules
Mac OS X Hints offers View a summary of installed Perl modules
Perl for Website Management book site
The Perl for Website Management book is helpful, but even more so are the samples found at the book site. There is even a Perl for Website Management book Wiki that has some of the samples and some other related info.
I have found the book to be very helpful for giving ideas and means to approach dealing with Web access logs.
Powells Books Booty
Okay, here is the list of booty from Powells Books... Metarepresentations: a multidisciplinary prespective edited by Dan Sperber, a description of this Cog Sci overview book help understand it better. Kunstler's The City in Mind. Feynman's Six Easy Pieces, which I started this morning on the train and really enjoy. William Gibson's Pattern Recognition that I started reading on the plane and has really pulled me in. A string of tech books, MySQL Cookbook, Perl and XML, and Java and XML, and based on Peter's recommendation Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy. This and yesterday's mentioned Hofstadler book should about cover it. I really wish there were a Powells Books where I lived, but my wallet does not wish the same. It is great to be able to see the books and evaluate how helpful the book will actually be to you before buying.
I also added Information Architecture: An Emerging 21st Century Profession by Earl Morrogh while at the IA Summit. It seems to be a very good overview on first pass and it comes very highly recommended. I met Earl at the Summit and he is purely delightful and very much a part of the IA community.
Perl site scraper
Screen scraping with Perl www::mechanize will come in handy for many tasks. The information reuse possibilities are wonderful. This does seem to require somewhat valid HTML/XHTML to function properly.
Perl and ColdFusion updates for OS X
A couple reminders of things to look at, well atleast for myself: Updating to Perl 5.8 on Mac OS X and installing ColdFusion MX on OS X.Apache 2.0 builds for OS X
Hmmm... Yesterday I was looking at Apache and the other two pieces of the triumvirate PHP and MySQL. Today I ran across what could be an improved option, Server Logistics' Apache 2.0 along with Perl, PHP, MySQL, and Postgres. Apache 2.0 provides multithreading and other improvements to the incredibly stable and supreme Web server All of this is set to build and run on Mac OX 10.Blosxom offers RSS aggregation with perl
Blosxom is a Perl RSS blog aggregator that works well on Mac OS X.Expat help for Mac
An overview of expat will help tie the loose ends together. For those Mac heads reading you may also want to take in Life with CPAN by Jeremy Mates which puts together the missing pieces for Mac.Perl and XML from the command line
While we are on the Perl and XML kick, O'Reilly offers Perl and XML on the Command Line.Perl to parse weblogs
Looking to parse your Web logs to gain those wonderful nuggets of information regarding those that visit your site? If you have perl at your fingertips (those of you with OS X do natively) check out Perl for Web Site Management's sample chapter, Parsing Web Access Logs. This will be a very good start, if not exactly what you need.Yesterday was all about getting the synapses to fire in the right order at SXSWi. I was running on sever sleep deprivation from phones and alarm clocks ringing when I had not finished my needed sleep cycle. None-the-less I had a great time. I greatly enjoyed Steve Champeon's peer panel on Non-Traditional Web Design, as it focussed on the fine art of tagging content, understanding the uses of information, and the true separation of content, presentation, and application controlling the information. The Web Demo panel I was on seemed to go rather well as there were a broad spectrum of sites reviewed and the information from the panel to the developers was of great use (I hope) as I think we all learned something.
The evening provided good entertainment, a wonderful gattering at the EFF party. Once again many folks adjourned to the Omni Hotel lobby for the after-hours social gathering. I spent much of the time just listening to conversation and occasionally partaking. Of intrigue was Rusty of Kuro5hin and Adam of Brian of Slashdot discussion development of site tools that will help a dynamic site fly, keep in mind all these tools are in Perl.
John Udell looks in to perl to create topic maps and bottom up taxonomy. Making taxonomy and topic maps easier is a great endeavor and quite useful.
Web Services Interoperability from James†Snell on O'Reilly Net's XML.Com. This wonderful piece demonstrates, with code, the interaction that is currently possible with standard development environments. This is familiar territory for me from a recent past life, although it was not using SOAP, like these examples do.
Matt makes observations of the state of severs and scripting deployments. I agree with nearly all of what Matt point out. Some of the reasoning behind the varying set-ups is for security reason's, others are to mirror configurations on other servers that had slightly different purposes. In all, what this needs is a solid documentation tool. PHP provides some of this with a function that prints out the build of the server that script resides on, this is usually the first task many of us perform on a machine. This however, is just the tip of the iceberg of the information we need.
This is part of the second and fourth element of the cornerstones of information application development (info apps need to be usable, maintainable, reliable, and repeatable). If a task is difficult to maintain and even harder to repeat there is some work that needs to be done to change the environment or the application.
I am so happy as I have a system at home that is stable enough to build the Active State components: Komodo, ActivePerl, and ActivePyton. It is nice to have an option to the command line and to be able to test with out FTPing scripts up to a server.
Everybody has been talking about RSS lately. You ask, "What is it"? Remote Site Summary is its full name and the O'Reilly Net offers Create RSS channels from HTML news sites to help you get a better understanding.
This site will be adding an RSS feed in the near future. RSS allows you to pull together a bunch of RSS files from your favorite sites and parse them then build your own link page, with summaries, to current articles or postings from your favorite sites.