search.cpan.org has an RSS feed for recently uploaded modules but there's only one minor problem: the feed doesn't have rich metadata.
Daisuke Murase (aka typester on CPAN and IRC) created a site called CPAN Recent Changes a while ago and it's been really useful for people tracking activities on CPAN.
The feature the site provides is very simple: "a better recent change log for CPAN". The site tracks the recently uploaded modules from search.cpan.org and grabs Changes file and takes diff against the previous version, so you can see what's changed in the release (unless the author is too lazy to update the Changes file). The site of course publishes the RSS feed for the recent uploads to CPAN, with the changes in the summary field, so you can keep an eye on it without clicking the link to see what's changed.
You can also follow changes in different views, like modules under the specific namespaces (e.g. Catalyst or DBIx-Class) or modules uploaded by specific authors (e.g. me or Ingy) and they all come with RSS feeds too.
.. but it doesn't currently match the Recent page on search.cpan.org, as it only contains very recent entries, not those from the last week.
However, this may not be too much of a problem soon, as Andreas is looking at providing feeds directly from the PAUSE upload system, with feeds for the last week/month/quarter/year. Typester's feed is a nice companion for those that would like more info, although typester might want to get in touch with Andreas and see whether their ideas could be merged.
From my POV it will be nice to move away from the screen-scraping of the Recent page for CPAN Testers (CPAN::YACSmoke::Plugin::Recent), and use a more reliable RSS feed, particularly one where the user can specify how far back they wish to go, beyond a week.
Re:A Nice Start
miyagawa on 2007-10-18T09:25:52
I believe the history is there on his database (since the site launched more than an year ago) and he could provide a view for it, but that's not a big problem since most RSS readers keep track of the entries archive on their own.
