Ovid

If I recall correctly, this project started a year and a half ago in Copenhagen when several of us were talking about the idea of having a modern blogging platform for the Perl community. Naturally, it had to be written in Perl. We've deliberately kept this low-key as we have known others talk about this before, but nothing came of it. It's good that we kept it low key because it's been a long time coming.

There was a private mailing list and we (participants can out themselves if they choose) discussed at length the various features we might want. While we never had complete agreement, a compromise set of things was pretty much agreed upon.

• A multi-user blogging platform.
• Must be written in Perl.
• OpenID support (for commenting, but not blogging).
• Tags.
• Images (yay!)
• Syntax highlighting.

The images were very important to me, at least, because sometimes I want to do stuff like have a quick image of a class hierarchy:

And if I want syntax highlighting, I just put it in <pre><code> tags (but html escaping is required):

sub is_valid_json ($;$) {
    my ( $input, $test_name ) = @_;
    croak "usage: is_valid_json(input,test_name)"
      unless defined $input;
    eval { $JSON->decode($input) };
    my $test = __PACKAGE__->builder;
    if ( my $error = $@ ) {
        $test->ok( 0, $test_name );
        $test->diag("Input was not valid JSON:\n\n\t$error");
        return;
    }
    else {
        $test->ok( 1, $test_name );
        return 1;
    }
}

If you don't want syntax highlighting, just use <pre><tt> tags instead.

And, of course, you'll see tags at the bottom of this post.

There are plenty of minor issues to iron out, so this blogging platform should be considered an alpha, but so far, I like what I'm seeing.

See also Alternatives to Inheritance. It's a repost of a use.perl post I made and lets you compare what you'll see here with what you see there.