Report for February 2013

A couple of days ago I posted my monthly report for January.

Part of the reason for posting these is to help me see how much (or how little) work I have managed to do each month. It is not easy to build an on-line business as I can be distracted easily by various fun projects that might be interesting, but that don't move my business forward. (see below)

The problem of course, is that without the business making enough money I won't have time to do the fun things...

Anyway, the January report was posted quite late, but now I am posting this right after February ended and I plan to stick to this.

February 2013 report

A total of 19 articles.

This is slightly more than in January.

Actually I think soon I'll have to reduce the number of articles and invest more energy in creating products and services. It's not easy, as I like writing and publishing these articles. Especially when I get (positive) feed-back, and when people share it via their social networks. (hint, hint :)

Perl 5 Maven passed the 2,000 daily visitors!

In February I had the first day when the visitor count passed 2,000. In December it was mostly under 1,000/day! (At least according to Clicky. Google analytics reports about 10% less visitors each day.)

The Unique visitor count on the Perl 5 Maven site was 25,572 in February up from 21,707 in January 2013. That's 17% growth. The visits count was 34,319 up from 27,799 in January 2013.(23% growth) The Returning visitors rate is 32.33% up from 27.79% in January.

At the same time szabgab.com went down from 8,206 to 7,396. This is expected as some of the a pages were moved from szabgab.com to perl5maven.com. (Update: on, May 1, 2013 all the content of perl5maven.com was moved to perlmaven.com and thus the link on szabgab.com were also replaced.)

These numbers are according to Google Analytics.

Advanced level Perl

I published a new edition of the Advanced Perl Maven e-book that brought in a few new customers.

There were three articles published:

Beginner level

I mentioned to the people on the Perl 5 Maven mailing list that I am going to raise the prices of the beginner e-book. Probably this motivated a number of people to buy the book.

The following articles were part of the Perl Tutorial.

META::CPAN related articles

I tried to check what was the impact of my Meta::CPAN related posts in the previous month, but in the update on the licenses and the repository links on CPAN I had to report there was no change in the numbers. Maybe these things seem to be important to me, but less so to other people. Or I just could not reach the people I should have reached.

At the Israeli Perl Workshop I had an idea, how the community might encourage people helping out with modules. This lead to some discussion, a few e-mails and an article on adding the list of contributors to the CPAN META files.

Community related

Mostly I managed to avoid the "How shall we name Perl?" and "does Perl have a future?" discussion.

I posted my long overdue report about the Perl Reunification Summit, a collection of links to the other PRS repors and that I am sad.

Maybe even this was too much involvement. Maybe I should have shout off all this discussion and just focus on helping people use Perl.

Other

There were two articles that were quite spontaneous. The one about CGI, mod_perl or PSGI isn't too good, but it might serve as a hub for some later articles.

The article on improving Perl code using Perl::Critic is quite good. I think. It can be part of a series about refactoring.

Israeli Perl Workshop

I have to admit that in the previous few months I had little energy working on the Israeli Perl Workshop 2013. Partially because I did not see any enthusiasm from others. Partially because I started to work on several non-Perl courses and it seemed my focus is shifting. Then, probably the sudden increase in the number of visitors at the Perl 5 Maven site energized me. (See the numbers above and last month.)

In the last couple of weeks I put in quite some energy in reaching out to people, and in the end there were more than 50 participants. Less than last year, but this year the event was on Shushan Purim which is a Holiday in Jerusalem and there is no school. So parents with little kids had harder time to join us. Also, this year we charged money as in every other year except last year.

In the end we were also lucky as both Booking.com sponsored us and we had Liz and Wendy as guests!

Sponsors

Both the Perl Weekly and the Perl 5 Maven got their first two sponsors. It's not much, but I think it is a step in the right direction.

Training classes

At the beginning of the month I only had 2 days of Python training planned for April(!) and nothing for February and March. Then something happened and suddenly I had a lot of course requests. Some I already started to give in February, others will be run in March.

In February I had 3 on-site training days running a Beginner Perl Maven course. Two more days of this course will be in March.

Plans for March 2013

JFDI