Dave's Free Press

Module pre-requisites analyser

As a service to module authors, here is a tool to show a module's pre-requisites and the test results from the CPAN testers. So before you rely on something working as a pre-requisite for your code, have a look to see how reliable it and its dependencies are.

Wikipedia handheld proxy

I got irritated at how hard it was to use Wikipedia on my Treo. There's so much rubbish splattered around their pages that it Just Doesn't Work on such a small screen. Given that no alternatives seemed to be available - at least, Google couldn't find any - I decided to write my own Wikipedia handheld proxy.

It strips away all the useless rubbish that normally surrounds Wikipedia pages, as well as things like the editing functions which are also hard to use on portable devices. Internally, it's implemented using perl, LWP, and mod_perl, and is hosted by Keyweb.de.

New Bryar feature

Another tiny new Bryar feature - the CGI front-end has sprouted an extra method 'is_mobile' which you can call to figger out whether the user is on a mobile device or not. It's available in your templates like this:

and then use is_mobile like any other TT variable.

New Bryar feature

I just added support for specifying keywords (which the cool kids call "tags") in your Bryar postings. Please see if you can break things while I test them on this journal.

Please note that I've not yet added keywords to my old postings. That will take quite a while to do, so please be patient. At the time of writing, keywords 'bryar' and 'whisky' should do vaguely useful things.

You can even subscribe to keyword RSS feeds, like this.

XML::Tiny released

I have released my XML::Tiny module. The parser at its core is less than twenty lines of code. Pretty easy to follow code too, I think, and that also includes error handling. One of my aims in writing it was to keep memory usage and code to the absolute minimum, so it doesn't handle all of XML. The documentation says that it supports "a useful subset of XML". Personally, I think it supports the useful subset. It's certainly enough to parse the data I get back from Amazon when I use their web services, and to parse an RSS feed.

New Bryar release

As I've been promising to do for ages (it's over a year since Simon said I could take over maintenance of it, and several months since I promised Bob that he could have all the shiny new features I had planned) I've finally got round to releasing a new version of Bryar, the software what provides the brains behind this 'ere august journal.

The most important change is that I released the stuff for filtering out comment spam.