Remember PerlScript? When Internet Explorer Could Run Perl

Perl and Internet Explorer

Every now and then I’m reminded of a technology from the early days of the web and wonder if I imagined it. This week, it was Mohammad using WebAssembly to run Perl in his browser. Which led to me thinking about PerlScript. If you’re a certain age, and you spent any time developing web applications […]

App::HTTPThis: the tiny web server I keep reaching for

I *heart* http_this

Whenever I’m building a static website, I almost never start by reaching for Apache, nginx, Docker, or anything that feels like “proper infrastructure”. Nine times out of ten I just want a directory served over HTTP so I can click around, test routes, check assets, and see what happens in a real browser. For that […]

Elderly Camels in the Cloud

Elderly cloud camel

In last week’s post I showed how to run a modern Dancer2 app on Google Cloud Run. That’s lovely if your codebase already speaks PSGI and lives in a nice, testable, framework-shaped box. But that’s not where a lot of Perl lives. Plenty of useful Perl on the internet is still stuck in old-school CGI […]

Dancing in the Clouds: Moving Dancer2 Apps from a VPS to Cloud Run

Dancing in the Clouds

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 […]

Easy SEO for lazy programmers

MooX::Role::SEOTag

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 […]