I didn't see it mentioned above, so will mention the mod Date::Manip that will save you a ton of repetitive motions with anything to do with dates. You can use just about any type of manipulation that you would like. With it you can pretty much eliminate setting up arrays with month names (October, November, ...), or names of the days (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, ...) or anything having to do with dates. Read the perldoc on it and you will find it quite comprehensive. I find the perldoc so comprehensive, infact, I use it to get the formating I can never seem to remember with using date on UNIX systems. Check it out, I believe that you will like it.

UPDATE: Fixed the CPAN link.