I discovered pQuery the other day, and had been meaning to try it out.

I got the chance to use it today, and I have to say, I’m impressed. I am, however, rather wary that the last release was nearly two years ago; I’m not sure I’d want to use it in production code unless it’s being actively maintained – I might use it for non-important things before making that call.

Anyway, a brief example:

Let’s say you want to capture the content of a paragraph/div with the class “bar” from a page somewhere.. it can be as simple as:

pQuery('http://www.example.com/foo.html')->find('.bar')->html;

Let’s say you want to extract all H1 headings instead:

pQuery($url)
    ->find('h1')
    ->each(
        sub { say "Heading: " . pQuery($_)->text; }
    );

I’d love to see this continue in active development – there’s several features it could really use, but what’s already there is handy stuff!

I’ve been playing with Github lately, and rather liking it.

I did briefly try it about a year ago, and was impressed, but wasn’t driven enough to consider moving away from Subversion.

I tried it out more when I started contributing to the Dancer Perl framework, and got to like it; since then, I’ve moved several of my modules over to Github already.

I finally got round to moving some miscellanous Perl scripts too, ones which I’ve been meaning to release as open-source in case they’re of use to anyone, but didn’t get round to doing.

They’re now online at: http://github.com/bigpresh/misc-scripts.

Github made sharing my code easy – Github++;

Now, that’s enough geekery for one evening.

Version 1.150 of the Dancer web framework has just been released, so this seemed like a good time to write up this post.

Recently, I’ve been wanting to find a Perl web framework that I really got on with. I’ve used Catalyst, which is very powerful and popular, but it’s quite heavy (a lot of dependencies, and reasonably high memory usage and startup time), and I felt as though it forced me to code “the Catalyst way”, rather than staying out of my way and getting on with writing my code.

I took a look around at the current Perl web frameworks (e.g. CGI-Application, Jifty, Catalyst, Mojo…) – all good in their own ways, but for various reasons, none of them really struck me as something I’d be particularly happy to work with.

I did briefly consider trying to write my own, but that’s a wheel I do not want to re-invent – there’s enough odd-shaped wheels out there already.

When I found Dancer (a port of Ruby’s Sinatra framework), I immediately liked the fact it looked simple and stays out of the way as much as possible, so I gave it a try – and, I must say, I’m impressed.
Continue reading Dancer 1.150 released – a flexible, lightweight web framework for Perl →

I prefer to run CPAN.pm as a normal user and have it use sudo just for the actual installation, rather than running tests etc as root.

I have an annoying habit of forgetting the option names , so I’m posting this here for my reference, but might be useful for other people too.

To do that, do the following from a CPAN shell:


o conf make_install_make_command 'sudo make'
o conf mbuild_install_build_command 'sudo ./Build'
o conf commit


Also, whilst documenting that, to set your preferred CPAN mirror:


o conf urllist unshift ftp://mirrors.uk2.net/pub/CPAN/
o conf commit