Happy birthday Dancer! 2 years today!
This is reposted from the blog of David Precious (bigpresh), original entry available here.
Today marks two years to the day since the first version of Dancer hit CPAN!
According to the BackPAN, Dancer-0.9003.tar.gz hit CPAN on 07-Aug-2009.
I think you'll agree we've come a long way since then, thanks to the awesome community and user base built up around the project since then.
In these two years, we've had countless valuable contributions from a large list of contributing users (see the list on the about page), gathered over 300 watchers on GitHub, had 84 people fork the repository on GitHub, had 620 pull requests submitted... amazing stuff.
We've seen a wide range of awesome Dancer plugins appear on CPAN.
We've seen Dancer presented at various conferences including FOSDEM, OSDC.fr, the French Perl Workshop, the Bulgaria Perl Workshop, PyWeb IL (an Israeli Python group).
We've seen screencasts on using Dancer (thanks Gabor!), we've seen Dancer discussed plenty within the Perl community with plenty of helpful suggestions.
Unfortunately, we've also seen some trolling from someone who, for reasons unknown, seems to take a strong dislike to the project - puzzling.
As a result of some of the trolling which included fake reviews falsely attributed to members of the Sinatra team, we've seen our initial inspiration, Ruby's Sinatra project, release a statement proclaiming that "Sinatra Loves Dancer".
So, to celebrate Dancer's 2nd birthday, I think a little marketing effort would be good - I'd like to invite you all to let the world know what yout think! Do you use Dancer? Do you like it? Let people know - blog about it, tweet about it, leave positive reviews & ratings on cpanratings or +1′s on MetaCPAN - however you like.
(If you leave reviews/+1′s, feel free to also do so for any Dancer plugins you find helpful, too - they need the love too! :) )
Also, if you don't already, please "watch" the Dancer project on GitHub - just go to the project page and click the "Watch" button near the top.
Pithy quotes on what you like about Dancer suitable for inclusion on www.perldancer.org/testimonials would be very welcome, too :)
Also, we've come a long way, but we have a long way to go, too - we have some great improvements to Dancer planned, but suggestions for new features would be very welcome - it's always good to know what users would like to see!
So, happy birthday Dancer, and happy dancing, community!
And, of course, an invitation - if you're interested in Dancer, but aren't already part of the vibrant welcoming community in the #dancer IRC channel on irc.perl.org, feel free to join us - see http://www.perldancer.org/irc for a web chat client if you don't use IRC normally.
Gots to do the bloggingz
Probably a really good way to promote your web system would be to give some real-life examples of how it makes it possible to do some task which is difficult to do without the system. Some of the example pages have a negative effect, since at least one of them seems to be purely static content, and others may not be getting a lot of visits from the general public. I'm not suggesting you delete anything but maybe you could point out five "wow" sites at the top of the list or something.
Also, positive reviews on cpanratings or testimonials aren't really convincing unless they actually can show some web site or some job which they are using Dancer for. If you put a testimonial like "I've just started using Dancer and I'm loving it so far" that doesn't make a strong case to a user why they should use the system.
You can see my review on cpanratings is a parody:
but it isn't a very far-fetched one. Take out the joke about the recently-deleted blog, and it almost reads like one of your testimonials.