Frontpage staleness detector

[diotalevi]

Category:

PerlMonks Related Scripts

Description:

This fetches the front page, does a quick guess at which nodes are questions and produces a histogram of the dates and how many nodes there are from each. I use it to check when the page is getting old and people aren't front-paging enough.

It'd be nicer if someone else were to package this into a CGI (remember to use a cache) and give us all a link. Or better yet... have to auto /msg people or tell the CB or something.

use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::Simple 'get';
use vars qw( $URL );

$URL = 'http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=131';

exit main( @ARGV );

sub main
{
    my $continue = 1;
    my $prev     = ~0;
    my %days;

    $days{$_}++
        for
        grep {
            $continue && $_ <= $prev
                ? do {
                    $prev = $_;
                    $continue }
                : do { $continue = 0 } }
        get( $URL ) =~
            m(<!--\s+Begin\s+Post\s+-->
              (?s:.+?) on \s+
              [ADFJMNOS]\S+ \s+
              (\d+)
              [\d\s,]+\s+
              at \s+[\d:]+)xigs;

    print "Dates of nodes on the Monastery Gates\n"
        . join '',
          map sprintf( "% 02d: %s\n",
                        $_,
                        '*' x $days{$_} ),
          sort { $b <=> $a }
          keys %days;

}

[allolex]

I'm curious about this structure:

exit main( @ARGV ); ... sub main{}

Why are you using it? (style, efficiency?)

[diotalevi]

It makes clear that there isn't some other code at file scope-level that isn't going to run later and less visibly. I just do this for scripts.