Blogging for Perl

I think it was at YAPC Copenhagen in 2008 that a small group of us first discussed the idea of building a shared blogging platform for the Perl community. It was over a year later that we launched blogs.perl.org.

I remember a lot of discussions over that time where we tried to thrash out exactly what we wanted to build. I know that one of my main drivers was that I wanted to replace the journals feature of use.perl. For those of you too young to remember, use.perl was a Perl community web site from the dawn of time. The site ran Perl news on its front page, but users could also have their own journal. For a few years, we had a nice little blogging community on the site. It used the same software as Slashdot and, like Slashdot, was looking pretty dated at the time. I remember being particularly disappointed that you couldn’t put images in a journal entry.

So that was certainly where I started from when planning blogs.perl.org. I wanted a modern blogging platform to replace use.perl. Other people wanted slightly different things. At least one person argued strongly that what we really needed was a nice-looking blog aggregator and that people could do their actual blogging on their own sites (or some other blog provider).

But, as you can see, that point of view lost out and we implemented a full blogging system using Movable Type.