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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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perl.com Redesign 20 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • ORA may be a company and it may be obvious that they are all over this site...but c'mon, at least they are trying to keep it current and useful.

    When was the last time anyone updated the www.perl.org page?! perl.com is the main page for perl if only because there are no other alternatives that come close to the content and freshness.

    Thank you O'Reilly for all the thankless work you do on perl.com in spite of the fact that your web designer is a crackmonkey :)

    e.
  • Actually, the reason why the site's font looks so bad in Mac IE is that the font is _NOT_ Arial but Helvetica and IE seems to not like Postscript fonts at all. You can find this out by downloading the css file (awkwardly named "linux-px.css"). Overall, a pretty bad design, and I hate it that they dont separate articles and mailling-list-summaries anymore. ->malte

  • All good points of course. It is current and useful. And I am grateful for all of the support that O'Reilly gives to Perl. I just worry that it might give the impression that Perl is an O'Reilly product if you didn't know any better.

    But you're right, the most positive thing to do would be to get working on www.perl.org to make that the community's main page for Perl. I'd be happy to get involved.

  • Well this is nothing new. http://www.perl.com/cpan-local, since it appears in most ORA books and seemingly everywhere else, led most to believe that CPAN was an O'Reilly thing. Even someone on the london.pm list wondered why the CPAN logo wasn't done in the 'Perl Font' :)

    You may have noticed the FUNET logo appearing on CPAN lately since we want to thank them for donating the rather large amount of resources needed for the archive and to help correct the impression that everything in Perl is an O'Reilly fu
  • OTOH should be used only once
    if a third thing is needed OTGH

    (on the gripping hand, "The Mote in God's Eye", Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle)
    --
    Were that I say, pancakes?
  • (I work for editorial, not for the O'Reilly Network, so this is second-hand info. Just so you know)

    The O'Reilly Network pays for the editor of the site, and for articles, and has done so for zillions of years. The old design was a pain in the ass for them, because it wasn't like the other O'Reilly Network sites. This new design is the same as on all the other ORN sites, and run on the same content management system, so no special clue or coding is required to update and maintain it.

    They feel like the P

  • I *do* work for the O'Reilly Network, and everything Gnat says is true. The old site was a big drain that we supported for the sake of the community, and the redesign will make a huge difference in how easy it is for us to manage the site, and keep it up to date.

    Also, a lot of the "exploitation cries" sound like the kind of whinging people ordinarily reserve for enormous impersonal multinational megaconglomerates like AT&T or Time Warner or Disney or (ahem) Microsoft. This baffles me, because we're no

  • Well, since the other ORA employees are chiming in...

    I never cared for the blue banner look of perl.com (I miss the old oasis design). The new design is presentable and that makes me happy.

    The bigger issue, that doesn't direct affect readers is that the content management system for perl.com was upgraded from PACE to CS (www.communityservers.com). This makes a lot of things much easier for all the other O'Reillynet sites (which are running on CS). That's a Good Thing.

    Layout has never meant much [aliensaliensaliens.com] to me.

  • Nope. I was making a reference to the part of Fiddler on the Roof where Tevye would say "on the other hand" a half dozen times, then wonder how many other hands he had. Note that the character Tevye was concocted by a man named Arnold Perl, thus bringing us full circle.
  • I say this with my editor hat firmly off, but Dave, if you're unhappy for O'Reilly to be running the site, you really shouldn't have taken money from them for your article, should you? That is, if you have any integrity.

    But here we go again. Someone does a service for the Perl community for years, and the minute they try to cover their losses - note, cover their losses, not make a profit - some ungrateful bastard jumps down their throat.

    And you wonder why more people don't try and help the community. Yo

  • www.perl.com gives the impression that Perl is an O'Reilly product just like www.xml.org and www.onjava.com gives the impression that XML and Java are O'Reilly products. O'Reilly is just putting its money where its mouth is in terms of Perl; this is something you ought to be grateful for.

    On the other hand, it's good to see that perl.org is moving again after a long period of stagnation. I'd personally like to see more interaction between the sites, with perl.com for feature articles and perl.org for commu

  • (And I say this with my editor hat on, this time. :)

    If you have any comments or complaints about the new design of the site, please send them to me at simon@oreillynet.com, or my boss, Dave Sims, at dave@oreilly.com. If you notice any bugs with the actual HTML or browser incompatibilities, you could take it up with nancya@oreilly.com, but please CC me so that I can follow it up and get back to you on it. We really do want you to get the best value for the money we're paying! :)

  • But now we have use.perl.org for news, it's not very clear what sort of thing should happen on perl.org

    Big/Important news, any kind of Perl user group type news and links, links to Perl resources, cute little RDF box off of use.perl.org, maybe an RDF box off of perl.com, too.

    (Yes, I know some of that is exactly what's there; this means perl.org has some of exactly what I think it should have; though, the stuff on the left is almost exactly upside-down from what it should be...)

  • schuyler, you forgot to include your email address. :-)

    The RSS file at http://www.perl.com/pace/perlnews.rdf seems to have a syntax error. Please send me a mail at ask@perl.org (or get someone who can fix it to do so). :-)

     - ask

    ps. I think the new design is at least much nicer than the old one and that it looks like the rest of the O'Reilly sites can be thought of as a (nice) feature. :-)

    --

    -- ask bjoern hansen [askbjoernhansen.com], !try; do();

  • Sigh

    Sounds like I might not have been as clear as I thought I was. Let me try and be clearer.

    • I am very grateful for all that O'Reilly does for Perl and the Perl community.
    • I think that the perl.com site is by far the most useful web site for general Perl information. On all of the training courses I give, I recommend people visit it at least once a week.
    • I am well aware of the effort and cost that goes into keeping a site like perl.com online and up to date and realise that O'Reilly are putting a lot of
  • More often than not, web designers are compelled to design for the boss, rather than for the user. I'll give the designer of perl.com the benefit of the doubt on this one.


  • *Ahem*

    I don't think Dave was taking it to such an extreme level.

    And, as I recall Simon, you had rather harsh criticism not so long ago about perl.org and it's management or lack thereof.

    No good deed goes unpunished in this community, ever. As long as you get past that, it's all good.

    e.
  • Arial is super ugly on the Mac, especially the version that came preinstalled a while back (I dunno which Mac OS). But Microsoft's typography site [microsoft.com] has a more recent version that is less ugly, especially at small sizes. It's still not as readable as Arial on Windows, but it is an improvement for a lot of sites.

    Note I still think it's in bad taste to design using Arial without a Mac alternative first (i.e., "helvetica, arial, sans-serif")
  • I did forget. I'm schuyler@oreilly.com. Flames welcome! :-)
  • A little late, perhaps, but I--for one--appreciate the recent changes to the redesign. Searching is far easier than it used to be and I don't mind seeing O'Reilly's presence more clearly associated with Perl.

    Since they pay Larry to work on the language and have been instrumental with Damian's current position, I think they deserve a little credit. Hat's off for being so willing to take it on the chin from those that don't realize and for continuing to do what's right in spite of that.

    At the very least
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