The first commit in my CPAN dashboard repository is from July 2015. And I mention it in passing in a blog post from the same month, but it seems to have gone mildly viral over the last few days.

It's not a particularly complicated piece of code. It grabs the list of my CPAN modules from the MetaCPAN API and then creates a table (using Bootstrap - which makes up for my total lack of design skills). Each row of the table represents one of my modules and the columns display badges from the various services that I use to monitor the health of my modules (Travis CI, Coveralls and Kritika).

I've talked about the dashboard a few times in the intervening years (here, for example, is a talk from last year's London Perl Workshop) but I've been slightly disappointed that no-one else (as far as I know) has ever used it to monitor their modules.

But that might be about to change. Recently, Gabor wrote an article about using Github Actions to test Perl modules automatically and used that as a prompt to add a basic testing Github Action to all of my modules and then found a simple way to add a Github Action status button to the dashboard.

Adding the Github Action to my modules wasn't entirely successful (I have quite a few issues to fix) but I was pleased with how easy it was to add the new button, so I tweeted about it and posted an image to a couple of Facebook posts. And this time people seemed to notice it and I've seen quite a few people talking about it over the last few days. Then on Saturday morning, I saw that Gabor had made a video discussing it.

So, while people are talking about it I'd like to promote it a bit. If anyone would like help to set it up for their CPAN modules, then I'd be happy to do what I can do get it up and running. I'm also thinking about setting up a site where any CPAN author can easily start seeing the health of their modules - more information on that soon. And in a Reddit discussion, Gabor points our that it's really not tied to CPAN or Perl at all and that programmers in any language might be interested in using a dashboard like this. It's certainly something to think about.