Yak Shaving with Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn Frontispiece

I have a few ideas for static web sites that I want to build. And, currently, the best place to host static web sites is, in my opinion, Github Pages. And if you’re hosting a site on Github Pages, everyone knows that the best tool to use is Jekyll. Or is it? I’ve tried to […]

Genealogical Timelines in Perl and SVG

Genealogical Timeline for Prince George

If you ever read my (mostly dead) more general blog, you might know that I’m a bit of an amateur genealogist. I’ve been tracing my family for over twenty-five years and I’ve got some branches of it back to the 1700s (actually, I have one branch back to the late 1600s). One problem in genealogy […]

Timeline Diagrams with Perl

Diagram of the "begat" sequence from Genesis 5

Two weeks ago, I introduced you to my new module SVG::TrafficLight and hinted that there were more SVG-based modules to follow. Today, I’d like to talk about the next one – SVG::Timeline. It all started over a year ago when I was looking through some of the more ridiculous religious questions on Quora when I […]

Drawing Traffic Lights With Perl

Traffic Lights

For a thing (that you may hear more about at some point in the future) I needed diagrams of traffic lights. But Google Image Search didn’t really have what I was looking for. Everything was either too realistic or not CC-licensed so I couldn’t use the images how I wanted. So I decided to do […]

Shaving Last.FM Yaks

Long-time readers might remember that I once had a bit of an obsession with aggregating web feeds on sites that I called “planets”. I wrote Perlanet to make this job easier and I registered the domain theplanetarium.org to host these planets. The planets I built were of varying levels of usefulness – but of all […]