Report for July and TODO for August 2012

July was a busy month. Both the Perl 5 Maven, and the Perl 6 Maven sites got a good head-start. I posted on blogs.perl.org while my personal site moved to the back seat.

Looking at the calendar, seeing its a new month fills me with energy.

Besides, today is the one year anniversary of the Perl Weekly newsletter.

So what has really happened in the last month?

Perl 5 Maven

I set up payment on the Perl 5 Maven site, and started to sell both the Beginner Perl Maven and the new Advanced Perl Maven books.

They both went surprisingly well after I announced them.

There were 6 posts in July, but only one of them The 19 most important file-system tools in Perl 5 was really new. The others were articles I refreshed and moved from szabgab.com. In the next month I'll need to make a better mix and write a few new articles while updating and moving old ones.

Perl 6 Maven

The Perl 6 Maven site is just a month old, but as I already had the Perl 6 tricks and treats mailing list I could bring in visitors.

There were 8 articles in July. The most visited was the one Moritz Lenz wrote as a guest post: Converting Iterative code to Functional Perl 6 code. Posting it on Reddit brought more than 1000 visitors, and the usual negative comments from some Reddit users. I still wonder if it is useful to post something on the programming subredit, or if it is only damaging to the heart.

Actually there was a pair of comments I liked very much:

ameoba: Perl 6 is about as relevant at Common Lisp.

studentforever: Do you mean that for the next 60 years every programming language that invents something new will be copying it?

I think you might be on to something.

I like the attitude of studentforever.

The Most popular shell commands using Perl was a response to a Perl 5 challenge brian d foy posted.

The How to test Perl 6 modules and scripts? was in response to people looking for a stable programming language.

The other 5 articles were refreshed old articles moved from szabgab.com to their new home.

Perl 6 Tutorial

I took the slides from my Perl 6 course and published them as the Perl 6 tutorial.

I have not really announced it yet as I only had time to refresh the first few chapters, but you can already take a look and comment on it.

blogs.perl.org

I wrote 5 entries during July. Three of them were aimed at trying to get people make more out of their own blogs by measuring number of visitors and by adding an image to their profile.

Unfortunatelly the visitor counting was shot down by the site admins as that revealed a security issue with the site. JavaScript is not allowed on blogs.perl.org any more. I hope they'll be able to allow us running some kind of traffic analyzis. In the short period I had the visitor counter running I saw about 170 people checking my article How many people read your blog? The follow-up: How to set up visitor analyzis on blogs.perl.org was a lot less popular.

When I posted about the Perl Weekly only 15 people clicked through to the Perl Weekly.

So either I could not encourage people well or almost all the readers of blogs.perl.org are already following the Perl Weekly.

I certainly would be very interested to know how many people read the articles on blogs.perl.org.

szabgab.com

As I moved some of the articles to the Perl Maven sites, the number of visitors on my own personal domain is in a downward loop. This is ok, expected and even planned. After all I wanted to move the focus the the Perl Maven sites. It still has more visitor than the Perl Maven sites together but I expect this to change by the end of August.

Plans for August

Last month I did not make any grand plans and it worked out quite well. It seems it depends more on my availability than my planning.

In August I'll be a bit more busy.

On 3rd August I'll participate at the August Penguin (Hebrew), the local annual Penguin festival, and I'll give a talk Writing Modern Web Applications using Perl. Which reminds me, I should really finish and practice the talk.

Between 16-23 August I'll be in Germany visiting and giving a talk at YAPC::EU.

This will limit the time I can write articles, but I hope not by much.

By the end of August, I'd like to move all the Perl 6 related material from szabgab.com to Perl 6 Maven and add a few new articles as well.

As I have a lot more Perl 5 related articles on szabgab.com, I won't be able to move all of them by the end of August. Not even by the end of September. The plan should be to reach the point where the Perl 5 Maven site has more visitors than szabgab.com by the end of August.

I am also planning on publishing two more e-books on the Perl 5 Maven site. Stay tuned and register to the newsletter.