Acme::ReturnValue 1.001

At the German Perl Workshop I did a lightning talk on Acme::ReturnValue and in the process of preparing the talk started to rework the module. I have now finished the slight modernization of the code (eg using Path::Class and Moose coercion) and fixed some issues (eg handling of __PACKAGE__->meta->make_immutable). I switched to Dist::Zilla, which (on the one hand) is very nice, but (on the other hand) caused me to upload a tarball to CPAN that included not only the rendered website but thousands of JSON files. Then I figured out how to configure the GatherDir plugin...

I've also did some modification to the website. The list of cool values is now arranged more clearly (the list of packages per return value is hidden via JQuery, so you can scroll through the funny values more easily). I've also added a disqus-powered comment box and fixed some minor HTML errors.

I still haven't set up a cronjob yet, but it should be much easier now, because I now remember which dists I already checked between each run. This changed the run-time from a few hours to a few minutes.

When my son asked me what I was doing (while I was working on the website), I explained the concept to him and showed him the site. He found it very funny! This reminded me that this whole return values "hacking" is a good representation of one of the core qualities of the Perl community: Fun!