It’s quite possible that over the last year or so you’ve heard me muttering about a secret project that I’ve been working on. Well, this morning I can finally reveal what it is.
Do you ever wish that the Perl community had a centralised blogging site where anyone could set up a blog for free? Something, perhaps, that allows you to use modern blogging features like images in your posts or tags.
If you’ve ever wished for something like that, then can I suggest that you take a look at blogs.perl.org. I think it might be just what you’re looking for.
The site is built using Movable Type and we were lucky enough to get some people from Six Apart to build it for us. I’d like to particularly thank Steve Cook of their professional services division who has done a lot of the actual work. Thanks also go to Jeremy King who designed the site and David Jacobs who is their manager and allowed them to work on the project on company time.
From the Perl community I need to thanks Aaron Crane who is hosting the site and Curtis Poe and Aristotle Pagaltzis who have both been involved in planning this project. Many other people have given invaluable advice or have been early testers of the site. Thanks to everyone who has been involved.
All that remains now is for you to try it out. You should regard it as a beta test version, so some of you will find problems. When you do, please just let me know and we’ll fix them.
I hope you enjoy the site and find it useful.
Update: Yes, there seems to be one quite glaring problem with it. That’s the web server errors that are generated occasionally when someone tries to log in (or out). Seems to be a resource allocation issue with the server. We’re looking into it. Please bear with me.
Wow, that looks beautiful and usable – congratulations.
It’s exactly what I had in mind for perlblog.org, but I didn’t have the JFDI attitude and time. Still if you want that as an alternate domain, feel free to contact me.
Firstly, this is brilliant. I’ve been waiting and hoping someone would finally do this so I have somewhere to leave use.perl for.
A couple of questions.
1. Is there any way to bring across my use.perl posts (there’s several years worth of stuff in there).
2. If, as seems to be inevitable, my corporate fun filter decides that blogs.perl.org is social media and should be blocked, is there any way I can set up a CNAME or similar from journal.ali.as or whatever to the blog, so that I can evade it?
I haz some issues with my new account. Posts are posted without any stylesheets… not sure if that’s my problem of someone else’s
Looks pretty cool.
Got a server error on attempting registration, though, assume that’s part of the problems you mentioned.
Cool.
My Google login seems to have worked too.
Hey Dave,
I’m getting a “Can’t Fork” error when trying to set up a new blog, apparently when MT is attempting to send the confirmation email.
It seems to be working now. I’m getting the same issue mentioned above about stylesheets — the .css files linked from my index page appear to all be 404ing.
Still, much appreciation for all the effort you put into this. I’m a big fan of MT. (And Perl. 🙂 )
Is there any particular place to file a bug report with the site? If so, perhaps it would be helpful to put that address/url on any error pages that come up.
I currently can not sign in to blogs.perl.org using my openid.