DEV Community

Toby Inkster
Toby Inkster

Posted on • Originally published at toby.ink on

Increasing Perl’s Visibility, Redux

Quite a while ago, I blogged about how Perl projects should have websites to increase not only their visibility, but the visibility of Perl as a whole.

Perl has had the CPAN and awesome websites like MetaCPAN and its predecessor search.cpan.org for a long time, so unlike how things happen in other programming language ecosystems, many Perl projects have felt no need to start their own websites for documentation, package downloads, and community — all these things were already provided.

However, I do feel that this centralization keeps Perl content on the Internet very isolated and makes Perl less visible than other programming languages.

I’ve recently released Web::PerlDistSite to provide an easy way to generate a modern-looking website for your project based mainly on its existing pod. You can then publish your site on github.io or your own hosting.

I used it to create this website for Exporter-Tiny and also to revamp the existing website for Type-Tiny.

If you’ve got a CPAN distribution and want to create a website for it, Web::PerlDistSite could be a quick way to get started. The documentation is pretty limited right now, but you can open an issue if you need help.

Top comments (2)

Collapse
 
szabgab profile image
Gabor Szabo

Nice!

We need a website for Web::PerlDistSite. Maybe one that could link to all the other sites generated by it.

Collapse
 
esabol profile image
Ed Sabol

This is just my opinion, of course, but, in your sample website for Exporter-Tiny, my first thought was that the website should say "Exporter::Tiny", not "Exporter-Tiny". I know one is the package name and one is the distribution name, but my gut reaction was that you should go with the package name, unless the distribution contains a lot of disparate packages or has a vastly different name from the primary package.