So, yesterday I wrote about Pod::Weaver’s history. Today, the much more useful topic of “how to use it now that it exists.”

One or two people who write Pod regularly said, “Yeah, I saw you blogging about that Pod thing. I had no idea what you were talking about.” A few other people said, “neat, but how do I use it?” Its documentation is getting better, but here’s a crash course in its history. Tomorrow I’ll write about its application (and maybe later I can turn this into some real docs).

There’s a bug in, I think, Pod::Simple. It’s been fixed, and affects only one release of the perl distribution: 5.10.1. Its effect is really amusing, though.

After numerous jerks and stops, Pod-Elemental is about as useful as it has to be for work on Pod::Weaver to really build up some steam.

I’m still really enjoying my Sony PRS-300. It’s a good piece of hardware and reading on it is pretty pleasant. I’ve been reading mostly free material, much of which is old stuff in the public domain. I’ve also read two Stephen King books that I bootlegged.

I have never been shy about stating my opinion on bards in Dungeons and Dragons. They suck. They make no damn sense and I wish, just this once, we could pretend that they never existed and drop them from the game.

After a few months of slowly edging toward the prospect, yesterday I bought an ebook. It’s a Sony PRS-300, which is their new “pocket reader.” It’s about the same size as my flattened hand, just a little thinner than my iPhone, and about the same weight as a paperback. Right now, I have it loaded with just over a hundred books and stories, and it’s about one third full.

The next release of App-Cmd, 0.300, will break backwards compatibility with App::Cmd::Simple. Nothing on the CPAN is registered as using it but I’m sure it’s being used. All other uses of App::Cmd should be fine.

Originally, I conceived of Pod::Weaver as a system that took two Pod streams and wove them together. One was the Pod that the user wrote. The other was Pod generated based on some stuff. (That’s about as concrete as the idea was.) This got rewritten a bit and interleaved, and poof, you had better Pod.

“Import things to a lexical scope” has been on my todo list for Sub::Exporter for a long time, and I often thought I had determined how to implement them in pure Perl, and was then often disappointed. The problem is that I basically know zero XS and don’t know how to mess around with B and the op tree. Clearly this needs to change, because the programmers I know who can sling XS and B can do amazing things.