Since I was forced to reinstall Perl and Apache at work, I've had itchy finders to do the same at home. Upgrading to Perl 5.8 fixes some long standing Unicode problems, and moving to Apache 2.x makes mod_Perl more useful on a Windows system. Okay I know Windows is a less than ideal system, and I should really be running some form of U*ix, but I've just not had the guts to switch to Windows for the desktop yet...
Anyhow as this weekend is Bank Holiday, so I've got time on my hands to do stuff. Often this results in a large Amazon order, I fancy some books Content Syndication and RSS and Practical mod_Perl, the new Capercaillie CD Choice Language and several DVDs. The problem is that there are a lot of DVDs that I don't own, and they are not exactly cheap. At least with the CD and books I already own most of the ones I want, so I don't spend as much on them at the moment. I feel really guilty buying books DVDs, and CDs, when I was a student a single CD was more than I spent on food for a week, so I was very careful. Now that I have a job, they don't seem like much anymore, but I still resist buying them unless I'm sure I actually want them....
I have done something productive though. I cleaned up my home server. It's not exposed to the Internet, but I use it as my home page, and as a framework for my simple RSS news reader client, some sites I work on, and as a place to experiment with Perl, XML and CSS. The "site" has been running on my PC for nearly 5 years now, and over that time has changed only once before, so this weekend it has been time to sweep away the cobwebs of SSI based page construction and upgrade to simple XML templates.
The templating system Simple On-the Fly Templating "SOFT", is a very light-weight XMLcentric system I developed a number of years ago. It's more like AxKit than anything else, but it's much simpler, and can even run as a cgi-bin application— which is has to on Windows Apache 1.3.x anyway. We use it at work, but it's only a temporary measure until we do upgrade to AxKit.
