A couple of years ago I thought that one thing the Perl community was missing was a network of blog sites about Perl. I’m not talking about the individual blogs that are being shown off to such good effect by the Iron Man project, I’m talking about a set of multi-author blogs that covered particular facets of the Perl world. Something like a Perl-specific version of LifeHacker or BoingBoing. To that end, I registered a number of domains and set about installing Movable Type.
That bit was easy. That bit I can do. The next bit is harder.
The next bit involves getting authors interested in writing for the blogs on a regular basis. That bit I didn’t do so well at and none of the blogs florished.
One of them didn’t even get going. That was Cultured Perl. The idea behind Cultured Perl was that it would discuss Perl culture. That’s all the non-technical bits of the Perl world. Perl Mongers, Perl conferences, things like that. I had a few authors signed up, but nothing ever really happened.
So why am I telling you this? Well, the Cultured Perl domains are up for renewal. And I’m trying to work out whether it’s worth keeping them.
Would you be interested in reading a Cultured Perl blog? And would you be interested in writing for it?
I would definitely be interested in it. I don’t personally know a lot of Perl programmers in the community (hi, by the way 🙂 so I’m not sure I could help write about anything.
But I can say I’ll definitely be interested in it.
Wait, where are the others? Are they all dead or could you link to them?
“Others” is a slight exaggeration on my part. There was one other. It was called Proud to use Perl. It’s also desperately in need of some love and attention, but that’s not as urgent as Cultured Perl.
Yes I would like to read Cultured Perl , definitely!
I don’t think I would qualify to write about it.
A blog about cultured programming in general sounds really interesting!
I’m less interested in another blog as I am in a better way for the Perl blog community to more consistently tag entries and aggregate them. For example, if I’ve written about Perl culture, then I could tag it “perl_culture” and some other site could aggregate it. It would be more topical aggregation than happens with the Iron Man project feed.
“A blog about cultured programming in general sounds really interesting!”
This is one of the problems we had the last time I tried to get this going. It was hard to get agreement as to what “Perl culture” was. I’m pretty sure that the most interesting interpretation of the phrase is the culture of the Perl community. I’m not sure what “cultured programming” even means, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what we’d be covering 🙂
On the other hand, perhaps I should just give the domain (with MT installed) to a group of interested people and let them decide what it’s about.
I would be interested in both reading and writing for a blog like that. I’m not in a position where I feel I could organize others, but a weekly (or biweekly) post about the communities I participate in (Moose, POE, irc.perl.org, Orlando.pm/Dahut.pm/PM Leaders, Conference Organizers) I could easily contribute to.
-Chris
Without anyone having laid it out more specifically yet, I think it’d be too hard to write continuously about “Perl Culture” as a whole, because it is so widely varied.
Chris’s comment above was the first thing to spark my interest. I think a blog aggregating news about the various sub-communities would be a good thing. Not just bugs squashed this week, but how projects are progressing, the state of Perl and open source IT generally in different cities and regions, ideas, worries, links with other projects, cool uses that have come up, that kind of thing. This approach could have a few benefits:
That’s my take on it. Chris +1, basically.
I like the idea and would probably contribute the occasional article. But I want to make these notes (also repeated in my Ironman Post this week 🙂 ):
1. I generally use my mdk.per.ly blog for the same sort of things, but, it is an Ironman blog so I also try to focus an article that I think is suitable for that competition. So I would have some crossover but hopefully complimentary ones.
2. As to dagolden.com/doubi, you may be interested to hear we are building an aggregator (firstly it will aggregate/collect Ironman posts) that will be called all.things.per.ly (currently it is in a restricted testing state), and is based upon the Perlanet from the good Master Dave. If you want to know more hang out in #northwestengland.pm.org on irc.perl.org and ask questions. The idea is to eventually aggregate results based on a selection of criteria such as date, category, tag, topic, person etc.