For quite some time, CPAN Testers have hosted the other public mirror of BackPAN. It's there mainly to help with the statistics and analysis for CPAN Testers, but it always helps to have another place to look for things should the primary BackPAN go down, or suffer a network outage. The mirror has been ticking along quite nicely for several years, but it doesn't have the glamour of a CPAN mirror. It also doesn't have any indexes.

Earlier this year, Neil Bowers had the idea to create some indexes for BackPAN. He wanted to perform analysis on everything uploaded to CPAN, including what wasn't on CPAN anymore. After several iterations, and a few ideas being thrown back and forth, Neil wrote BackPAN::Index::Create. I set this up on the server and we got a lot of new indexes. Except just having them on the server, wasn't really enough.

Neil then had the bright idea of revamping the index page. The basic page only contained a directory link, which didn't really say very much about what BackPAN. Between us we created a new index page. It could probably do with someone making it as pretty as the CPAN index page, but for now it's fine. It gives the directory link as before, but it now includes a bit of history and explanation for anyone new to BackAPN, and most importantly it includes the indexes. For the moment the indexes are only available on the CPAN Testers BackPAN, but if anyone wants to set them up on their own servers, take a look at Neil's module, and in particular the example script I use to create the indexes.

For more of the gory details, read Neil's blog post,  A new BackPAN index (generator).