I am no longer working for Slashdot/Geeknet as of September 30. I am actively seeking new employment. Unless you want to hire me, you don't need to care, unless you also care about use Perl;, because it has been generously hosted by Geeknet since I started the site over 10 years ago, shortly after I was hired by Andover.Net to work on Slashdot. Long story short, I have not done much with the site in recent years, so my options at this point are to do nothing; migrate the site to a new server and keep it running as-is; or take the data and do something with it on a new site. Or something I haven't thought of. I am hereby accepting proposals for what to do with use Perl;. In short, I would like to donate it to someone who will give it a good home. If you're interested, give me your best pitch.
Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.
Re:Thank you
ddick on 2010-08-12T02:15:02
Likewise. Most appreciated.Re:Thank you
xsawyerx on 2010-08-12T07:33:38
Same!
Thank you.
May it, and Perl, go on forever.
Thank you!
... or at least give me all MY data in a SQLite database or something, so I can migrate it?
(Assuming the site goes away, of course)
Re:Can we migrate it to blogs.perl.org somehow?
pudge on 2010-08-12T14:14:36
I dunno about migrating, but, yes, it is in my head that somehow I will make available the important data so people could import it elsewhere.
Maybe a mysqldump of all the stories, journals, discussions, comments, topics, sections, and the users (just the UID and nickname, maybe). Maybe also the friends/foes stuff.
Re:Can we migrate it to blogs.perl.org somehow?
arc on 2010-08-17T16:21:31
Hi, Pudge. Thanks for running use.perl.org for all these years; it was one of my first introductions to the Perl community.
I’m one of the blogs.perl.org admins, and we’d be very happy to import the existing u.p.o content into b.p.o as a way of keeping it available indefinitely. A dump of the data you mention sounds to me like a good way for us to get started on the import. I’m assuming that, given your blessing, Robert et al over at the Perl NOC would make use.perl.org a CNAME for the b.p.o server; then we’d rig up suitable redirections to make all the old URLs work as well as possible.
If you’d like to talk about any of this off-line, you can reach me as
arc at cpan.org.
Sorry to hear the bad news.
Losing a job can be very hard on morale and finances. You have many deep skills, and I wish you the best in rapid, gainful resolution to this change.
As to use.perl, it has been great, but lately the format has been eclipsed, affecting the content as contributing membership declines. Maybe the best thing to do is donate the content into another site like perlmonks. I have gotten a lot out of both sites. But the trend is to blogging.
I think use.perl may have had its day in the sun, though I enjoyed it, and was impressed how it stood higher than its peers.
Best of luck.
I said thank you on pudge glob, but I should say it here, as well.
Is there any chance of making a sanitized database dump available on bittorrent for a time? Do you have any estimates for how big such a dump would be?
I personally would relish the opportunity to go back and read many things that I've simply lost pointers to.
Re:Thank you
pudge on 2010-08-12T16:04:30
Yeah, see this comment: http://use.perl.org/comments.pl?sid=45034&cid=72307
use.perl.org has been around a really long time, and there's a LOT of history, useful stuff and important announcements in the stories, the blogs and their discussions.
And quite a few of these are linked to from other sites.
If we want to keep these links usable/working, then the URLs have to stay around - preferably "forever" (even if they are just converted to 302's pointing to their new location).
Is it possible to make sure the site keeps running at least until there's a sane replacement to switch to?
Re:Not sure if a DB dump is enough
Aristotle on 2010-08-14T00:41:07
Setting up a site that 301s all permalinks on the use.perl domain to corresponding migrated pages some other site shouldn’t be too hard if the migration and redirector are both based off the same dump, and the dump has enough information to infer the use.perl URLs, though. I’ve done that sort of thing before.
How hard would be to recreate use.perl.org on another server?
Re:use.perl.org should live
pudge on 2010-08-14T22:49:20
As I am not too interested in working on it anymore, pretty hard, since we'd need someone else to run it.
:-) Re:use.perl.org should live
chorny on 2010-08-14T23:01:43
Do I understand correctly, that Geeknet will not host it anymore? If yes and no one else wants, I may try to host it.
