All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
use Perl Log In
samtregar (2699)
Improving Meerkat's use.perl Journal Display
Class::XPath 1.2, a gift from the sea (2003.08.20 12:56)
So you get the title and the time the entry was made, but you don't get the author. The only way to see that is to mouse-over the link and read the ~name from the status-bar. And since I don't read everyone's use.perl journal I end up doing that a lot.
At one point I worked on a proxy CGI that would show me the author strings but it just got too damned complicated. There are cookies flying, redirects and relative paths all over Meerkat. I gave up.
Enter Middleman, a highly configurable HTTP/FTP proxy server with builtin support for doing Perlish s//g over web pages. A few minutes after installing it and turning off a bunch of banner-removal/web-bug avoidance stuff I don't need, I wrote this pattern/replacement pair:
(<a[^>]*)http://use.perl.org/~(\w+)/journal([^>]*>)([^<]*)</a>
$1http://use.p erl.org/~$2/journal$3$4 [ $2 ]</a>
Now my links look like:
Class::XPath 1.2, a gift from the sea (2003.08.20 12:56) [samtregar]
Awesome! I can tell I'm going to have a lot of fun with Middleman. It's got a lot of features and some neat development tools built-in.
In fact, if Graham doesn't let me integrate my CPAN differ into search.cpan.org soon I'll probably just add it for myself with Middleman! I've wanted it a few times lately...
-sam
Or is it a BUG?"
"Let's call it an accidental feature. :-)"
--Larry Wall in <6909@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Net::Meerkat (Score:1)
You might be interested in my Net::Meerkat [cpan.org] module, which will let you grab headlines from Meerkat, in all of the various output formats that Meerkat supports. It's especially useful if you've set up a custom profile.
I even included an example of how to use it with
HTML::Templatein the docs.(darren)