I decided to post Plagger updates to this blog, under "Plagger" category. It's a little bit tough and tiresome to write the same thing twice, or even three times (My main blog (japanese), Mailing List and here), but posting it on a blog makes it searchable and easy to keep track of.
So, Plagger development has been amazingly rapid. Lots of folks, especially people from Japanese perl hackers community have shown me their interest on it, and I adopted the anarchy "commit bit available on request" style development, which works really good so far. We've got 6 committers already and can expect more!
We have a couple of new plugins committed to svn repodsitory every day, which is amazing.
Plugin Policy
BTW, I think it'd be better to explain the policy of plugin distribution of Plagger here. As you can see on Plagger Wiki, the policy for now is "commit your plugin(s) to our svn repo under plagger core". I know it's not the best way, and including "plugins" in the core distro doesn't makes sense in some way. But since we're in an active / rapid development and I want to update the plugin hook APIs appropriately if needed, having plugins under our svn is very important. And having plugins under the 'plagger' main distro makes installation and testing just as easy as "svn co plagger" & "svn up".
If you want to write a plugin and distribute it on your site, feel free to do it, but I don't guarantee that your plugins will stay working if I make changes to the plugin API core in the future.
Release Engineering
I just upload Plagger to CPAN only becasue I want to announce the progress of our software to the perl hackers around the world. I don't expect anybody actually installing Plagger from CPAN shell, rather I want you to use it with svn (or svk).
Putting on CPAN makes the code searchable and browsable by Search CPAN and CPAN search (gonzui), which is good. I "release" and bump the version number pretty randomly, by every 50 revisions or stuff like that, to keep the developers motivated and maintain the "rhythm". That sounds like one of the most important things to me in the open source development.
So anyway, we got 2 releases this week. See ChangeLog for a list of all the updates, but I'll highlight some of the neat and exciting features and plugins here.
Search your Feeds
0.5.3 release adds 3 different plugins to allow search: Search::Rast, Search::Namazu and Publish::Spotlight.
I'm not an Mac OSX user, but the Spotlight plugin looks really neat. It creates *.webbookmark files and that makes the feed updates searchable by OSX Spotlight. When you add 'add_comment: 1' option, it tries to add $entry->body as a comment using Mac::Glue applescript thingy.
Similarly, Search::Rast plugin indexes the updates to the very fast Search engine Rast, using its perl binding thanks to Yappo. My Search::Namazu plugin uses Namazu to make the feeds searchable.
Since Daisuke Maki joined our development recently, we can expect him working on a very fast and scalable Aggregator using his Xango and search engine integration with Senna.
Simple Deduping
One of the very important things Plagger doesn't do yet is deduping the feed updates. If you use Bloglines subscription it's fine, because Bloglines takes care about it. But that'll be problematic when you load your own Subscription (using one of OPML, Hatena RSS, Odeo or Config) and aggregate them with Aggregator::Simple plugin.
youpy suggested a very simple Filter (actually turned into Rule later) called 'Fresh', so that it only matches with entries newer than a specific time. It works for most of the cases when you use 'mtime' option, which keeps track of the last aggregate time in a file's timestamp. Very UNIX way and I like it.
Misc.
Publish::IRC communicates with ircbot to announce the updates to IRC channel(s), Filter::StripRSSAd strips the RSS advertisement like Google Adsense for Feeds. Publish::MTWidget publishes the list of updates to MT Template Widget, which is compatible to Movable Type's Sidebar Manager.
That's all for today. Get interested? Join #plagger on irc.freenode.net (if you prefer Japanese, join #plagger-ja) and Mailing List now.
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