October 2011 Archives

blogs.perl.org needs your help!

As many of you have noticed and commented on, blogs.perl.org needs help and we're hoping this post might inspire some of you to volunteer time or creative suggestions.

Specifically, the blogging platform we're on has proved hard to maintain and while Dave Cross, Aaron Crane, SixApart and others have done great work on it, the tuits have run out.

You could check out the github repository, or perhaps offer help/suggestions on migrating to another blogging platform without losing information. Specific areas of attention that could use some help:

  • Prev/Next links on all blogs are needed (including on the front page)
  • Images are broken
  • Bring back the syntax highlighting

You can read through the full list of issues to get an idea of some things to take a look at.

SixApart, Dave and Aaron have done great work here and while it started out promising, it's still missing key features to make it a suitable replacement for the defunct use.perl.org.

We'll be watching responses to this, so feel free to chime in. Let's make this a blog that people can be proud of.

Tools I'm using to write the book

Since I can't really share the book with you, I figured I could share some of the tools I'm using to write it. They're a pile of hacks as I tend to flounder outside of Perl, but they work and I figured geeks would get some useful stuff out of them.

Querying ElasticSearch from VIM

I'm using ElasticSearch quite a bit and finally decided to make it easy to debug. I now write JSON queries with a .es extension. And have this in my .vim/filetype.vim file:

autocmd! BufRead,BufNewFile *.es      setfiletype elasticsearch

In .vim/ftplugin/elasticsearch.vim I've just added a very minimal setup for ElasticSearch:

if exists("b:did_elastic_search_ftplugin")                                                                                                                                       
  finish                                                                                                                                                                         
endif                                                                                                                                                                            
let b:did_elastic_search_ftplugin = 1                                                                                                                                            

set syntax=json                                                                                                                                                                  
noremap ,r   :!json_check %<cr>

New Beginning Perl book

So, I've been awfully quiet lately. There are a number of reasons for that, not the least of which is being the proud parent of a delightful little girl. Another reason has been simple: I'm writing a book.

About Ovid

user-pic Freelance Perl/Testing/Agile consultant and trainer. See http://www.allaroundtheworld.fr/ for our services. If you have a problem with Perl, we will solve it for you. And don't forget to buy my book! http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Perl-Curtis-Poe/dp/1118013840/