blogs.perl.org

Blogging for Perl

I think it was at YAPC Copenhagen in 2008 that a small group of us first discussed the idea of building a shared blogging platform for the Perl community. It was over a year later that we launched blogs.perl.org.

I remember a lot of discussions over that time where we tried to thrash out exactly what we wanted to build. I know that one of my main drivers was that I wanted to replace the journals feature of use.perl. For those of you too young to remember, use.perl was a Perl community web site from the dawn of time. The site ran Perl news on its front page, but users could also have their own journal. For a few years, we had a nice little blogging community on the site. It used the same software as Slashdot and, like Slashdot, was looking pretty dated at the time. I remember being particularly disappointed that you couldn’t put images in a journal entry.

So that was certainly where I started from when planning blogs.perl.org. I wanted a modern blogging platform to replace use.perl. Other people wanted slightly different things. At least one person argued strongly that what we really needed was a nice-looking blog aggregator and that people could do their actual blogging on their own sites (or some other blog provider).

But, as you can see, that point of view lost out and we implemented a full blogging system using Movable Type.

Ten years on, I think that was a mistake. I think that having a community blogging platform for Perl is actively harmful to Perl.

I’ll explain why a bit later, but first let’s talk through a bit of more recent history of the site.

It’s well-known, I think, that the site is not is a good state. I’m happy to explain what happened there, but it’s a long and rather dull story. There have been a couple of attempts to build replacement systems but they both stalled before they were complete.

So we’re left in a situation where the site is broken and no-one really has the time or the expertise to fix it. And attempts to replace it seem doomed to failure.

Earlier this year I decided that the situation was untenable and that I wanted to close the site down. I spoke to Aaron and he pretty much agreed with me. We decided that we’d give people plenty of notice to take their blogging elsewhere and, rather than closing the site completely, we would make it read-only (so all the existing content would still be there). We ran the idea past the rest of the loose “management team” and Aristotle spoke up, saying that he would rather take the site over himself and try to improve matters. And that’s what happened. Over the last few months, Aaron and I have extricated ourselves from running the site and it’s all now handled by Aristotle.

I wish him all the best in those endeavours and really hope he manages to make the site better than it was (he’s already making great progress in removing loads of old spam blogs from the site).

But, really, I think that my original plan was a better idea. I don’t want people to blog about Perl on a Perl community site. I want people to blog about Perl on sites where people blog about other languages and technologies.

I’ve been giving talks about the need for the Perl community to break out of its echo chamber for almost as long as I’ve been part of the community. But I think it’s important. It’s a kind of low-key marketing. If you’re talking about your cool Perl project on a Perl community web site then only people who are looking for Perl articles will find it. But if you blog about it on a general programming web site then a) you’ll get a far bigger audience and b) some of that audience might say “oh! I never knew Perl could do that – perhaps I’ll give it a closer look.”

And that’s why I think blogs.perl.org (and, probably, use.perl before it) are harmful to Perl. It encourages Perl bloggers to blog for the Perl community – when it would be far better to get your blog posts in front of more people. Perl people will still read your Perl posts (through Perlsphere perhaps, or post the link to /r/perl or the Perl Community Facebook group) but other people will see them too. On blogs.perl.org, you’re pretty much guaranteed that only Perl programmers will see your posts.

To be honest, I don’t understand why people still use blogs.perl.org. Until Aristotle’s work bears fruit it’s painfully broken. What do you get that’s worth putting yourself through all of that pain? Why not just blog somewhere else and submit your web feed to Perlsphere? Or blog where other programmers blog – somewhere like dev.to, perhaps (I’ve started publishing my more technical blog posts there).

I think it will be great if Aristotle gets blogs.perl.org working well. I really want that to happen. But it would be even better if he didn’t have to. If people stopped using it; if they went off and started spreading their interesting Perl blog posts all over the web.

Break out of the echo chamber. Find yourself a bigger audience. Spread the word beyond the Perl community.

Or, alternatively, explain to me why it’s so vital that the Perl community has its own centralised blogging platform.


Also published on Medium.


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13 responses to “Blogging for Perl”

  1. Matthew Persico Avatar
    Matthew Persico

    Because Perlsphere is friggen broken too. Every two or three weeks, the top posts are reposts form 10 years ago and no one seems to know how to stop it.

    1. Matthew Persico Avatar
      Matthew Persico

      Go look past the two top posts and see what I mean. Daveโ€™s Free Press articles get republished every few weeks.

      1. Dave Cross Avatar

        Yeah. That doesn’t look great, does it.

        A little digging reveals this…

        The config for Perlsphere is at https://github.com/mohawk2/perlsphere/blob/master/perlsphere.yaml

        That’s pulling the “Dave’s Free Press” articles using this feed – http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david/journal/index.pl/keyword_perl?format=rss

        And that feed doesn’t contain dates on the items. So I guess Plagger (which is what powers Perlsphere) assumes that undated items are current.

        I’ll raise a PR on the Perlsphere repo to remove Dave’s feed. And I’ll email Dave to see if he can fix it.

  2. Bob Lied Avatar
    Bob Lied

    Nicely articulated. I had no idea BPO had a foot in the grave. Thanks for also including some concrete alternatives.

  3. Lee J Avatar

    I think bpo probably still has a place, but I largely agree with you. My approach is to post to bpo if it’s *very* perl specific and would only be of interest to the Perl community. These things are more micro-news I would say and not really that interesting. Examples being “I’m updating this module, please test it”, “Here’s some meta information about some Perl thing”, etc. If I think the post is more broad, longer form, and could appeal then I’ll post to my own blog and then add links on reddit, HN, an so on.

    I’ve already blogged about this, on bpo since it was meta, but ultimately I don’t think it matters. The world has moved on. Anything significant/interesting/ground-breaking enough will get reposted all over the web and people will see it sooner or later. Most blog content is mundane noise. I’ll make that general appeal again to write less often, but more.

  4. Will Braswell Avatar
    Will Braswell

    The assessments presented in this article are provably untrue. Dave wrote:
    “So weโ€™re left in a situation where the site is broken and no-one really has the time or the expertise to fix it. And attempts to replace it seem doomed to failure.”
    This seems downright disingenuous, especially because I sent Dave a link to the active BPO upgrade thread on September 16th at 2:26pm (Central time zone), 1 day before this article was written. I invite everyone to read the ongoing BPO upgrade discussion before blindly accepting what Dave has written here.
    https://github.com/blogs-perl-org/blogs.perl.org/issues/382

    1. Dave Cross Avatar

      It is of course, completely possible that one of the people volunteering to replace the blogs site with their own system will have the time and the expertise to take on the project and complete it. Having been involved in the site for many years and seen two such projects fail, I hope you’ll forgive me if I’m slightly cynical about their prospects.

      But, even so, none of that addresses my main point. Whether or not someone can fix BPO, I really think we would be better off without it.

      1. Will Braswell Avatar
        Will Braswell

        Henry Van Styn clearly has the time and expertise, and has publicly volunteered to provide the same server space and source code upgrades as he has recently proven successful for upgrading the official TPF news blog:
        http://news.perlfoundation.org/

        1. Dave Cross Avatar

          And I would have said exactly the same thing about the teams behind the two failed attempts to rebuild the platform. I guess we just won’t know until it’s happened.

          But you’re still concentrating on an unimportant part of my post. It’s not important whether BPO lives or dies. What is important (in my opinion, at least) is whether it should live or die.

          1. Matthew Persico Avatar

            I think the aggregator is more important than a common blog spot. Give me one set of links to look at in the morning and I don’t care where they lead to.

  5. Buddy Burden Avatar
    Buddy Burden

    > To be honest, I donโ€™t understand why people still use blogs.perl.org.

    Because switching to a different blogging platform is a PITA? :shrug: As janky as it is, at least I know all its warts and foibles. Would I prefer to be using a site that actually worked more often than not? Absolutely. Do I have the time to invest into learning a another new blog posting interface? Not really. ๐Ÿ™

    1. Matthew Persico Avatar

      Every other blogging platform is pretty much Markdown now. What interface/

      1. Matthew Persico Avatar

        Sorry – fat fingers. Every other blogging platform is pretty much Markdown now. What’s wring with that? # for levels, ** for bold. – for bullet list. “` and ` for code. What else do you need?

        Go see https://perl.theplanetarium.org/. Pulls in stuff from all over. Go post someplace and feed it there.

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