learn.perl.org TPF grant update

Eric Wilhelm on 2009-05-03T03:02:21

Updates at http://learnperl.scratchcomputing.com.

I scrapped the existing templates today and brought it up from zero using my Shebangml tools (yet another as-yet-unwritten blog post.) This might make it a pain to fit back into the combust site, but I was feeling so shackled into the existing layout that I wasn't getting anything done. Right now, it will still be a few months before this is ready to go live, so I'll ponder that in the meantime. Maybe it will be trivial to make it work within the existing framework+combust, but I just have to go with the getting-things-done approach for now.

I spent a lot of time in this last month figuring out what everybody wants from the books listing and what to do with them. Between learn.perl.org and books.perl.org, there's a lot of confusion and duplication. My take is to yank the books off of the front page and put them in /books.html. It might be nice to add some of the cover thumbnails ala books.perl.org.

At least I've gotten some new content posted (the "Getting Started" and "Modules" tutorials.) If you have critiques of the tutorial content, I welcome you to e-mail me (ewilhelm at cpan dot org) with your thoughts.

Aside: combust has caused me quite a bit of frustration on this. If anyone has successfully installed it on Debian Lenny, please let us know how. I managed to get it working on Etch, but Lenny has dropped Apache 1.x and this workstation is the last Etch holdout (which causes frustration with everything else.) Alternatively, some way to run combust without apache would be extremely useful to perl.org in general.