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hex (3272)

hex
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http://downlode.org/
Perl, RDF and wiki hacker, London, UK. This is my former Perl blog; I now write at Earle's Notebook [downlode.org].

Journal of hex (3272)

Thursday September 13, 2007
05:45 AM

I'm not happy with the "gravatars" on search.cpan.org.

[ #34438 ]
While I appreciate the intent behind the recent decision to add these "gravatars" to search.cpan, I feel that the execution has been poorly thought through. This is a summation of points raised so far.

  1. While it looks nice, Gravatar is slow as crystals forming on a frozen monkey's ass. This has led to the necessity of having to write a daily grab-and-cache system for the images. If it's that bad, why don't we just write something ourselves that doesn't suck?

  2. Poor URI design at gravatar.com: http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=aae56c6a384319c00094d626845f6b6d

  3. It costs money ($10/year) to have more than one email address added to the system. Frankly, the commercial aspirations of the person who runs Gravatar are embarassingly transparent. That went out with the bubble, guy. If you're going to propose a "global" system like this, you have to do it for free, because that's what people expect - cf. OpenID. If you don't, somebody else will. (I wouldn't be surprised if someone in the Perl community up and does it, simply because of how poor gravatar.com is.)

  4. Talking of OpenID, I commented on one of the above posts that I'd only use Gravatar if it supported OpenID logins. I've been signing up to various websites for well over a decade now, and I'm dog tired. It's bad enough that I have separate PAUSE and BitCard and use.perl logins already; now we're going to throw in yet another incompatible system?

    Yes, I know, as Schwern points out, that implementing OpenID support in PAUSE and Gravatar would take some work. The burden here falls largely on Gravatar. PAUSE doesn't need to fully support OpenID logins yet, but it could simply have a field for OpenID URIs in user settings and query Gravatar on that basis.

  5. Not every search.cpan user reads use.perl.org. Adding this feature to search.cpan.org without wider consultation is, I feel, a mistake.

  6. Having a user picture on author pages is fine, but I don't want my ugly mug staring out at people from documentation for my modules. Sorry, but that just looks unprofessional.

  7. If you're going to add "social" features, you have to go the whole hog. Add user accounts to search.cpan, with preferences. One of those preferences must be "Display author pictures?"

  8. Where is Graham? Why has he not participated in any discussions on this site so far, and we have to email our comments to him? And why is the code that runs search.cpan.org not open? I've heard that question asked over and over, and we've never had a satisfactory response.

  9. Before we start adding new stuff, can't we get our own house in order first?

    • cpanratings.perl.org ratings.cpan.org
    • cpanforum.com forum.cpan.org
    • annocpan.org annotate.cpan.org

    Yes, I know these are all different projects, but even though they're all fairly-well accepted by now, there's barely any interconnection between them, and they don't even have similar URIs. We're a mess.

Until some more thought has been put into this, I think I'm going to follow the example of LotR on #perl and add gravatar.com (and search.cpan.org cached copies) to my AdBlock filters.

-- Earle


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I'm not happy with the "gravatars" on search.cpan.org. 17 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • If you don't like Gravatars or CPAN Search, you don't have to participate. But, not only that, you can write your own. OF course, when you start that, you'll realize why the guy is asking for $10. Also, if Graham wants to spend his time doing other things and doesn't want to make his site open source, who cares? It's his project and he can do whatever he likes with it. You can start you're own project that meets your own non-technical. sociological, and political goals and do whatever you like with it.

    Pictu

    • I agree with much of what you said, but I think one of Earle's points you didn't address is:

      Before we start adding new stuff, can't we get our own house in order first?

      • cpanratings.perl.org ratings.cpan.org
      • cpanforum.com forum.cpan.org
      • annocpan.org annotate.cpan.org

      This didn't really have to do with gravatars, but I think it would help show the cohesiveness of the Perl community to outsiders if it did happen. Why wouldn't the community want that?

      I understand that it would create work for Graham to change the links from cpanforum and annocpan to forum.cpan.org and annotate.cpan.org. Maybe he doesn't want to do it and that's fine. But I think Earle was just bringing up the

      • I agree with the site naming part.

        It would also be a good idea to put links to the various sites on the front page of cpan.org, because people will go there looking for various sites.
      • I like that projects have their own domains. I like to think that there are a lot of different people out there interested enough in Perl to do these cool things, rather than some big organization doing it. I like decentralization :)

        As for links on www.cpan.org, that would be nice, but no normal people really cares what's in the HREF. All the links are in CPAN Search right with the module page :)

    • I agree. Everyone who wants to contribute:

      1. Should start his own project.
      2. Provide his own server infrastructure.
      3. Evangelise in the community for the weeks or maybe months until he has some semblance of traction.
      4. Continue maintaining his project in isolation from the other similar projects.

      I don’t understand why people would want to pool their resources. In a situation with limited volunteer tuits available, it’s most effective to divide them over as many similar projects as possible.

      • Well, it works. I did it with Perl Mongers and The Perl Review, and many people have done it with their projects.

        When you remove the irony, you are really saying:

        1. Everyone must let just anyone mess with their project
        2. Someone who doesn't get paid should make their infrastructure open to everyone else, and maintain it for them
        3. People shouldn't have to work hard to promote their own work
        4. Somebody else should do most of the work

        Thre's no problem here, except people thinking they have a right to somethin

        • Apologies in advance for the “quote every sentence and respond to it” style of this comment. I hate it and try to avoid it, but there’s no other way to write this one. It boggles my mind how you manage to get every single aspect exactly backwards.

          Everyone must let just anyone mess with their project

          How does setting up to make the contribution of patches possible imply that you are somehow forced to apply all patches you get?

          Someone who doesn’t get paid should make their infras

        • Step one is not being a public ass about it. You complain in public and attack people, and you just about kill your chances to help out. It's not a hard concept to understand, but geeks don't like it because it involves people skills.

          You were doing badly enough until you got to this part when you started insulting me. I had a nice, long, reasoned reply mentally queued up to go, but you just killed your chance of ever seeing it. Instead I feel moved to say this: brian, go fuck yourself.

          • brian, go fuck yourself.

            What a swell way to tell people that you're not someone to work with.

            --

            --
            xoa

            • Whereas calling someone a 'public ass' is the perfect way to announce you're Mr Congeniality ;-)
  • There is part of me that just wants to yell, "FOR FUCK'S SAKE IT'S A 40 BY 40 PICTURE! SUCK IT UP YOU BAG OF WHINGERS!" So I will. And it's not just at you, hex, it's more a building frustration that this Gravatar thing frames.

    You know what really pisses me off? What ever happened to "hey, cool idea! A little rough around the edges, but I see where you're going." Maybe even, "here's a patch to make it better." No, I get "it doesn't do EXACTLY what I want EXACTLY the way I want it so I'm going to bloc
    • [replies in no particular order]

      Ok, send feedback to Graham via proper channels. You don't like something? HELP FIX IT! Bitching is not doing.

      I'm sorry, but when it comes to THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT SITE IN THE ENTIRE PERL WORLD, I like to discuss things in public. Because you know what? There's no mailing list for it. No newsgroup. No wiki. use.perl is the closest thing we have. If you, Graham or brian aren't happy with a public and gravely important community website being discussed in public, that'

      • 99.9% of all Perl module users use search.cpan

        You're in a vicious cycle. Nobody will write something different because everyone uses search.cpan.org. Everyone uses search.cpan.org because nobody has written something different. (Not to dis on kobeserach, of course, but it's also mostly the same as search.cpan.org. There's little radically different.)

        But the attitude of "this is the site that everyone uses" is exactly the centralization that Schwern is talking about. Where are the CPAN mashups?

        --

        --
        xoa

        • Where are the CPAN APIs?

          • Make your own mirror. You have all you need to make aristotlecpan.com.
            --

            --
            xoa

            • What is that non-sequitur a reply to?

              Your asked where the CPAN mashups are. I answered that the existing services provide no APIs, so no mashups get written. And no, a dump of several gigabytes worth of moderately inconsistent data in quirky formats does not an API constitute.

      • You know the beautiful thing about perl is that I can mostly disappear for a few years, have a kid, not give a damn and casually stroll through one evening out of curiosity and find the same shit going around the spin cycle. I giggle at the thought of Schwern telling anyone to offer Graham patches. Holy fuck, what a sadist he is. :)

        That code likely rates so high on the scale of milibarrs that it would inflict rapid cranial decompression for most who would gaze lustily upon it. It has been almost a decade

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