Since starting the Perl Survey I’m really starting to see how little that “in crowd” has to do with the full set of Perl programmers out there: both because so many of the non-regulars have responded to the survey, and also because I’ve had so many comments saying “Wow, people still use Perl?” If the Perl folks are all over on use.perl talking to each other and not being visible to the rest of the world, it’s a nice cosy little environment for those few people but I think it’s bad for Perl on the whole.

Not that cosy environments are a bad thing btw! I would just like to see a few features to make use.perl.org more visible/well known, and also see us promote the other options that are out there, rather than centralising quite so much.

Me, I actually like use.Perl for the most part – I wish the HTML sanitiser was a tad more permissive but at the same time I appreciate the resulting minimalism. (Some of its aspects are really crappy, granted – the page titles are one example.) The interface doesn’t get in my way either.

What really really matters, though, is that it serves as a central place to find the weblogging Perl community. I see everything that gets posted there (and I read about 92% of it): if you’re on use.Perl, you’re on my radar. If you’re not, I might subscribe you or might not – that bar is much higher. And there are many like me. (This comes up every time someone posts another “hey folks I’ll be blogging over there now”.)

So I think use.Perl continues to provide an important service; anything new that addresses the same space really needs to enjoy the same community support that use.Perl has had, IMO.

I don’t know that the other dynamic languages have anything like that (although that may just be ignorance on my part). Assuming they don’t, it is just another example of how the communication in the Perl community is tighter-knit than elsewhere – but unfortunately also yet another example of how that isn’t very visible to the rest of the world.

Can we keep the good things about use.Perl while addressing its shortcomings? (Would your plan, maybe?) That would do a lot of good, I think.

(PS.: it would be nice if the “get notified” checkbox remembered that I checked it when previewing.)

I have some other plans simmering away… you can be sure I’ll post about them if/when they move towards being anything more than random ideas.

More visibility means more Google juice.

use Perl as a whole already has a rather high PageRank.

And more Google juice means — hopefully — that when people search for “Perl blogs” they might actually find some.

If you search for “Perl journals”, the use Perl journals page comes up as first hit.

Here’s a much bigger problem than the fact that Technorati doesn’t index use Perl journals: check out the page titles at use Perl. They’re basically worthless, almost every single one of them. Journal entries do not include the entry title in the page title, whereas the comments of an entry (illogically enough) do include it but do not include the subject of the comment itself.

As far as regular search engines are concerned, page titles and the words in the URI are extremely valuable. This is in fact so important that I added extra machinery to my main weblog so I can give people coming from Google the right leads.

Not that I disagree with the premise, mind; I just think there’s much more to do than just get the use Perl crowd to sign up with Technorati. A big part of the “problem,” in my opinion, is that in teams of peak hype, Perl dates back to an era where most of the conversation happened off the web – on mailing lists and Usenet. (Cf. Perl Monks being the most unusual kind of messageboard I ever saw anywhere; it’s much more like Usenet groups than it is like web fora.) This has imprinted on Perl culture; the movers and shakers in Perl generally don’t keep high-profile weblogs. It’s p5p, clpm, and to some extent IRC. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head would be Dan Sugalski, back when he was head of Parrot.