For years, most of my Perl web apps lived happily enough on a VPS. I had full control of the box, I could install whatever I liked, and I knew where everything lived. In fact, over the last eighteen months or so, I wrote a series of blog posts explaining how I developed a system […]
A few of my recent projects—like Cooking Vinyl Compilations and ReadABooker—aim to earn a little money via affiliate links. That only works if people actually find the pages, share them, and get decent previews in social apps. In other words: the boring, fragile glue of SEO and social meta tags matters. As I lined up […]
Recently, Gabor ran a poll in a Perl Facebook community asking which version of Perl people used in their production systems. The results were eye-opening—and not in a good way. A surprisingly large number of developers replied with something along the lines of “whatever version is included with my OS.” If that’s you, this post […]
Earlier this week, I read a post from someone who failed a job interview because they used a hash slice in some sample code and the interviewer didn’t believe it would work. That’s not just wrong — it’s a teachable moment. Perl has several kinds of slices, and they’re all powerful tools for writing expressive, […]
Back in January, I wrote a blog post about adding JSON-LD to your web pages to make it easier for Google to understand what they were about. The example I used was my ReadABooker site, which encourages people to read more Booker Prize shortlisted novels (and to do so by buying them using my Amazon […]
