You do raise some fair points regarding use.perl. I’ve been reading the journals there for years now and even posted my own back in the day. As such I’m used to the somewhat antiquated look and unintuitive journal navigation. But I do agree that it’s not exactly conducive to attracting a new larger audience.

I think you’re right about the conferences in a way. They seem to be huge sources of energy in their own right, but if you can’t get to them then they have a way of sucking energy away from everything else. I suspect one way to improve this is to have more outward-facing publicity around the conferences, before/during/after, so that people can appreciate them even if they can’t attend.

Regarding a possible cause for lethargy — the perl community seems very strongly tied to its various conferences. This is probably great if you can attend the conferences, but if you can’t, it’s not so good; it tends to select for the people who are *already* at the heart of things, rather than attracting outsiders.

I’d love to see Aristotle’s ideas in practice… and good luck with perlbuzz — I’ve subscribed ;)

The userscript can be found at http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/11661 , and a screenshot at http://flickr.com/photos/pfenwick/1210782257/ .

This doesn’t help new people discover the journals in use.perl, but it does help existing readers push content out to the meta-blogosphere. Feedback, questions, tests, patches and the like are welcome.

For those who happen to stumble on the fact that there are user journals on the site, it’s almost impossible to find how to read them sensibly – which is via the search page, where you have to select the “Journals” radiobutton and leave the search box empty. That will get you a planet-style list of posts (but only summaries, no full content) which even has a useful feed (including full content!). That’s just completely undiscoverable.

[If you paste the above paragraph over the one in the previous comment and delete this one, I’d be grateful.]

If those who happen to stumble on the fact that there are user journals on the site, it’s almost impossible to find how to read them sensibly. which is via the search page, where you have select the “Journals” radiobutton and leave the search box empty. That gets you get a planet-style list of posts (but only summaries, no full content) that even has a useful feed (*including* full content!). It’s completely undiscoverable.

You know what I’d like? A site that brings *everyone* (who wants to be a part) into the fold.

The basic idea is something that combines the `planet` and `use` hosts of the `perl.org` domain: a portal where users can either create a weblog on-site or add their existing site’s feed. All weblogs, whether on-site or syndicated, would be shown in a single timeline on a planet-style front page with full post content.

On-site weblogs would offer the same features as commonly expected today; in particular, there would be minimal HTML filtering when viewing an individual weblog.

But some extra filtering would be employed when posts of different people get shown on the same page, to prevent anyone from playing nasty tricks. Each individual local weblog would also have a separate host, eg. `skud.blogs.perl.org`, which causes the browser’s same-domain restrictions to prevent cookie stealing and other general scripting nastiness.

The per-weblog host name also meshes well with the next point: minting an OpenID for every weblogger who participates.

The point of that is that leaving a comment on an on-site weblog would require OpenID sign-in too. Of course the site would recognise comments signed with its own OpenIDs, and would show extra user metadata above the comment in that case. So it would work just the way use.Perl comments work, encouraging the same kind of social meshing. But it would be much more approachable to outsiders, who can use any foreign OpenID they want, rather than having to sign up to leave a comment.

And of course the site as a whole would be much more approachable to outsiders.

See, I’ve got *all* of this laid out in pretty minute detail in my head… I’m just lacking in JFDI and tuits.