A shiny perl6.org site

I'm very pleased to announce that perl6.org now got a shiny new face - the one that Su-Shee developed for perl6-projects.org. I'd also like to thank Daniel Wright, owner of the perl6.org domain, for making that domain available to us.

The story behind it is as simple as amazing: I noticed that we had no good, up to date overview of what Perl 6 projects existed out there. So I bought the domain perl6-projects.org, put up a few lists of different projects - and gave it a rather bad design. Because I may be decent with programming, blogging and explaining things, but as a designer I simply suck.

But what I did was sticking the source code into a public repository (the pugs repository, to be exact) to which it is very easy to gain access, and made the server pull from that repository every 15 minutes. So basically everybody who wanted could update the site.

And lo and behold, four month later Su-Shee contributed a nice design, which we modified in small things based on feedback from #perl6.

Slowly it dawned to me (and others probably) that this site had the potential to be much larger in scope than a simple project list - it could evolve into the central web site for Perl 6 developers and users. With the small caveat that perl6.org would have been a much nicer domain name - but it was taken already.

But the whois entry gave us hope - it belongs to Daniel Wright, and a quick google search turned up that he's a perl monger, organizer and attendee of YAPC conferences. So we decided that pmichaud should contact him, being more of an authority in Perl 6 land than me.

After a few exchanged mails we found out that Daniel's and our goals matched, so about one day later he changed the DNS to the same IP that perl6-projects.org uses, I added another alias to the virtual host, and we were done.

It's a prime example both for attracting contributors, and for what you can reach by simply talking to people. Thanks to everyone involved.