"5. trust but verify" - some time ago I've promised to do blog series and a lot of water went down the river since then so it's really time to full fill the promise.
Why starting with part 5? As there was just one comment, from andy.sh that he likes the $title, on the schedule announcement, I assume it is the most interesting one. :-)
All (most?) CPAN authors are writing tests. Tests are cool, let us sleep well, let us discover "oh I forgot" thinks.
While code is once written and remains that way for a while, most pages these days are generated on the fly to put personalized information, banners or what ever fancy shiny stuff. This may make the testing a bit more difficult. Having the pages statically generated allows to easily test and most important validate pages still on dev system.
Let's have a look at vxml script. It will validate any xml file or a folder with .html, .xml, .rdf files using XML::LibXML for validation. In addition all internal links (a href, img src) in HTML files are extracted and tested if their target files exists. The output of testing is TAP. What else will be better if TAP can test anything? ;-).
While ba.pm.org can be generated statically some pages can not, especially the once requiring users to login. Lot of them have a high load and testing every request will kill (already loaded) machines. One technique is to take randomly only every Xth request and test that one as the part of response to the client. When put to PerlCleanupHandler than it has no effect on user experience.
