In which our hero counts off the list of inspirations and irritations encountered while blogging with Movable Type.

In which I am inspired by my fellow Perl hackers to write blog posts and code using the Moose object system for Perl.

One possibility is mod_perlite, an Apache module that aims to make Perl as easy as PHP for users to deploy and for service providers to host.

HTML::Mason is a template system with power tools built in. Here's a case study in the usefulness of Mason's internal caching tools.

Writing readable code means expressing yourself as clearly and correctly as you can, not targeting the lowest common denominator of reader.

Recently I read a note called DBIx::Class Gotchas over at Perl Alchemy. I've been struggling myself for several months with a bundle of old Class::DBI code, and I can relate. Both packages fall into the category of Object-Relational Mapping (ORM), software that tries to map programming objects around entities stored in a relational database.

How many times have you written a for loop to do something simple with a hash and thought, there must be a better way to do this? Using hash slices instead of simple loops can save you lines of code and execution time.

Oh, the irony is so heavy, it's breaking me!

When developing and deploying Perl code that relies heavily on CPAN modules (and if yours doesn't, it's either really simple, or you are not using Perl to its full potential), I find myself asking the same set of questions over and over again.

Pop quiz, hotshot. Your team has undertaken a project to completely redesign your web site. Fancy-pants designers are hard at work generating not one but three new designs. The designs will be put through a battery of usability tests, after which the best parts will be combined into the final design. They need you to create server-side logic that will populate content areas, navigation, and various design elements according to how the user manipulates the site. But the HTML is nowhere near finished, and the designers will be tweaking it right up to the day of the test. What do you do?

What is the best template system? Ask five people and you'll probably get six different answers. Perl has more than its fair share of template tools, from the Swiss Army Chainsaw of Template Toolkit, through HTML::Mason and Text::Template down to the ever-tempting "variables interpolated in a here-doc" method.

A few months ago I wrote a missive lamenting the coolness going on in other languages in terms of web frameworks and the dearth of magical leaps forward in Perl. Well, I take it all back. Serves me right for not recognizing hype for what it is.

One of my favorite sites, Perl Buzz, just pointed me to Kurila, an experimental Perl 5 fork. I'm not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I do love to see innovation in the Perl space. Perl 6 has been promised by Christmas, they just won't say what year. I figure 2014. But Perl 6 isn't Perl anyway, it's a new language in (tattered) Perl clothing. Perl 5 marches on in 5.10, though, which keeps me from complaining too much.

Our friends over at A List Apart have been publishing pearls of wisdom for years, and here is the proof. These articles on CSS drop shadows are actually from 2004, but the techniques are still (mostly) valid today. You can probably dispense with the extra hurdles they went through to support IE for Mac, though. Does anyone use IE on the Mac anymore?

[This was originally posted on Vince's personal blog, but is relevant enough that it deserves reposting here, I think. -Editor]

Yeah, it's cliche, but hey, it's my web site. Watch this space for actual content in the near future. Oh, Technorati wants me to link to my Technorati Profile, so there it is!