A few little bits and pieces, none of which justify a blog post to themselves.

blogs.perl.org

Some of you will have seen that Evozon’s grant to replace blogs.perl.org was cancelled a couple of months ago. This made me sad as I (along with the rest of the blogs.perl.org team) really want to see the current, fragile, set-up replaced as soon as possible.

I’m happy to see that a new grant proposal has been received from a team at Booking.com. They want to take Evozon’s work, along with some other improvements that they’ve made in house and complete the project.

I’d really like to see this grant approved and the project completed. Please feel free to add your comment to the proposal.

Perl News

Who remembers use.perl.org? For many years it was the best place to go for both Perl news and Perl blogs. The idea behind blogs.perl.org was to replace the blogging part of that site and a few years ago, Leo Lapworth and I built perlnews.org to replace the other part of the equation.

Unfortunately, neither of us really had the time to invest in the site and it never really took off. These days there are plenty of other places to get your Perl news, so we’ve taken the decision to close the site down. The existing stories will remain online and I might replace the current WordPress installation with a static site at some point in the future.

The Perl Conference in Amsterdam

A couple of my recent blog posts have been about deciding what training course to run alongside The Perl Conference (The Conference Formerly Known As YAPC Europe) in Amsterdam.

Unfortunately, my plans had a big collision with Real Life and I’ve realised that it’s just unrealistic for me to have enough time to prepare for the conference. So, sadly, I’ve made the decision that I won’t be in Amsterdam this August.

I’m sure it’ll be a great conference though and I wish the organisers the best of luck with it.

Web Application Development in Perl 6

Gabor asked me to give him a quotation explaining why I had backed his Indiegogo campaign to write a book on web development with Perl 6. This is what I sent him:

I’ve been largely ignoring Perl 6 development since the project started in 2000. I figured that I would have plenty of chance to catch up with it before clients started expecting me to know it. The official release of Perl 6 eighteen months ago means that the time is now right for me to start taking an interest. A lot of the code I write drives web sites, so I want to get up to speed with web development in Perl 6 quickly. That’s why I supported this crowdfunding campaign – I want to read this book and I think that Gabor is the right person to write it.

I think this will be a very useful book. You might consider backing it too.

CPAN Badges

I’m a big fan of the badges from shields.io. I use their CPAN badge on my dashboard. Unfortunately, this badge has stopped working – it just says “cpan | invalid”.

I did some investigation and discovered this was because they use the MetaCPAN v0 API – which has now been switched off. It was simple enough to patch the code to use the v1 API. I’ve sent them a pull request, but it hasn’t been accepted yet.