Elements or Lower

I’ve now released XML::Generator::RSS10::ipsv to the CPAN. This adds support for the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary List to RSS 1.0 feeds generated through Dave Rolsky’s XML::Generator::RSS10.

It’s accompanied by an update to XML::Generator::RSS10::egms. Installing this should install XML::Generator::RSS10::ipsv as a dependency.

In a busy week for blogging, I’ve released XML::Generator::RSS10::ev to the CPAN.

This small module adds support for “mod_event” to Dave Rolsky’s XML::Generator::RSS10. It tries hard to get event start and end dates to be output correctly in W3CDTF, allowing a range of input types.

I’ve finally added my first module to the CPAN.

XML::Generator::RSS10::egms helps to incorporate the mandatory eGMS category metadata into an RSS feed. It’s in use right now for Woking’s Latest News feed.

Of course, it’s only the slightest bit useful if you’re producing an RSS feed for a UK government site (and only then if you’re doing that in Perl), so its audience is probably fairly minimal. Nonetheless, the LAWS Syndication Guidelines are hairy enough that someone might find this really useful. It can’t hurt, at any rate.

It’s accompanied by XML::Generator::RSS10::gcl and XML::Generator::RSS10::lgcl, which are rather more trivial, and should install automatically if you use CPAN.pm for the egms module.

Not long ago, I wrote about some problems I’d encountered with integrating SVG::TT::Graph into the log analysis system within my CMS. I’d figured out that caching the generated SVG files on disk and displaying those avoided the problem of the graph never actually making it through to the client.

Well, it turns out that this wasn’t the whole story. It seems that running the module in a mod_perl environment can cause a graph to be created empty if the Apache child process running the request has already created a graph at some point in its lifetime. So, whenever I restarted the server, the graph would work — and of course it would sometimes work without restarting the server, depending on which Apache child process got picked to handle the request.

Evidently something’s setting a variable that isn’t being destroyed properly between requests in mod_perl. Try as I might, I can’t find out whether it’s something in my code, or in SVG::TT::Graph itself.

So, I’ve edited my code to run the graph creation as a regular CGI script instead of a modperl registry script, and it now genuinely works every time. The additional overhead of running it through CGI rather than modperl is troubling, but hardly a bottleneck in terms of speed — that honour goes to the volume of data in the log table of the database.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to find the problem with running it through mod_perl and correct it, but at least for the time being it actually works.