The terrible things (1): A Giant Perl Daisy Chain

This is the first article based upon my Keynote that I presented this year and is part of a series of articles on the Terrible Things We All Must Do.

Meanwhile…

While I was writing this article I was also checking the web and eagerly awaiting the keynote from Apple and their possible latest release, I know I am such a fracking fanboi or something, or maybe I just like cool devices, slinky sci-fi-esque toys – look I am a child of the 70s, this is all futuristic to me man. Also, Bubble Wrap is 50 years old today, so much fun from something so simple as the “Tension Sheet”.

She links me yeah, yeah, yeah

In my Keynote at the Oasis Perl Workshop (see my post last week) I mentioned that I would like to see a giant daisy chain of Perl sites. What I meant by this was down to obvious things we must do and a significant element missing from many Ironman Posts.

The obvious thing is to remember to name drop sites and people in your blogs, Twitter et al., of the people and places, especially Perl related, that you have been-seen-done-wanted-heard-insertownthing. Not only that, you must also link to them, and if you’re link isn’t obvious from its context as to what it is then you better do this, you better link twice, ’cause otherwise you’ll be naughty not nice. As an example, consider the request Miyagawa made of us to mention the best Perl Web Server (Plack) – you see not only do I link the phrase to follow in context I also name the thing and link that as well.

The element missing from many Ironman posts is a link to the Ironman Competition itself and the Planet Homepage. This is fairly poor people. There will be other visitors to your sites, not just those from the Ironman site, a link (or even use the banner I made or one of your own) will be very useful. There are something over 7000 posts on the Ironman archive and only 6300 links to Ironman on the internet, so even if the links are only from Blogs on this site that is a shortfall. Personally I think there is probably about half of them that don’t link to here – so make sure you do link on every post. Also try to link to the sign-up page so we get new competitors.

Socialise…

We need to make sure we link to each other and to make those links relevant, it is a tool we can use to make sure things are found  by people searching for information. By using the social media sites to talk about Perl and the things happening in our universe we can promote and raise awareness of the tools and language we all hold dear.

btw, as a matter of yet more praise I have to say that there are people to whom I owe much regard as they already do this to a great extent, one of those is my business partner Matt S. Trout and another is the (afore praised as magnificent) Dave Cross. They are not on their own, there are many others and we should join with them.

</rant>

A further article in this series will follow (maybe next week)

-ttfn – Mark