Perl snippets - Date manipulation

I am an amateur web perl programmer. All my slightly complicated web sites are built using perl. When I get stuck on some small bit of code the answer can sometimes be found on the internet somewhere.

From time to time I am going to post up some of the solutions I have found on my travels in the hope that it may help someone else out.

So the problem:

On one of my website I am automating the creation of a spreadsheet for upload to the google merchant's feed. I needed to create the entry for the Sale price effective date.

This is not something I store in the main database so needed to create the entry on the fly. Basically I needed to create the following entry:

2013-05-19T17:44:51Z/2013-06-19T17:44:51Z

So I started with today's date and then added a month to it, then put in the google specific bits like the '/' and the Z.

Here is the code:

use Time::Piece;

my $t = localtime;
my $t2 = $t->add_months(1);
my $t3 = $t->datetime.'Z/'.$t2->datetime.'Z';

Basically call the module Time::Piece then set variable $t to localtime. Create second variable $t2 which is $t + 1 month and then merge it all together in variable $t3 with $t being put into the correct format "2013-05-19T17:44:51" append a 'Z/' and then amend the other date in a month's time.

Simple really. 

Colourscape 2 - Steps

I have completed a second colourscape.

This one is called steps and takes a random colour as the base colour. Then in each of the red, blue and green components it steps back and forward by a set amount to see what happens if you change the value of one component but keep the others the see.

Basically it will show you what happens to the colour if you change the blue component only, the red component only or the green component only.

Or if you like it is something fun to play with...