Remember use.perl? It’s moth-balled now, but for years it provided two valuable services to the Perl community.
Firstly it provided a hosted blog platform which many people used to write about many things – sometimes even Perl. Of course we now have blogs.perl.org which provides a very similar service.
And secondly, it provided a place where people could submit stories related to Perl and then editors would approve the stories and publish them on the front page. Since use.perl closed down, the Perl community hasn’t really had a centralised site for that.
Over the last eighteen months or so I’ve had conversations with people about building a site that replaced that part of use.perl. But there’s always been something more interesting to work on.
Then, at the start of this week, Leo asked if I knew of a good Perl news feed that he could use on the front page of perl.org. And I realised that I’d been putting it off so too long. A few hours of WordPress configuration and Perl News was ready to go.
So if you have any interesting Perl news to share, please submit it to the site.
“Since use.perl closed down, the Perl community hasn’t really had a centralised site for that.”
🙁
That’s what we built Perl Is Alive for (ages ago – back when use.perl was still running but was embarrassingly 90s in appearance, and pudge refused to discuss improving its looks).
I imagine you’ll get more attention though.
Yeah, I don’t know why Perl is Alive never really caught on. But I’m hoping Perl News will get some more traction.
Why not use a Perl application instead of WordPress, it’s kind of ironic. Movable Type / Open Melody are very viable alternatives.
For exactly the same reasons that I moved this blog from Movable Type to WordPress several months ago.
MT and Melody might be viable options, but they just don’t have the ecosystem that WordPress does. I was tired of finding interesting plugins that hadn’t been upgraded to the latest version of MT or upgrading MT to find that everything broke.
With WordPress, everything just works.
Looks like I’m not the only bastard that needs his software to be worth using 😀 http://hashbang.ca/11/omg-is-that-wordpress