New Blog Backend

Posted by robbiebow on 31 July, 2009 under geek, perl | Be the First to Comment

I decided to give WordPress a crack and am convinced: it is much better than MovableType. Usability is miles ahead; updates, widgets, documentation – all much smoother, more complete, more useful. Even importing my posts from MT was painless.

As a Perl developer I know this is heresy: I am using a Perl Home Page application with all its inherent security flaws and ridiculous inheritance models. But PHP is popular and successful because it is so close to the interface, and people making web interfaces want to make things do things; they don’t care about security or class inheritance or even objects. And they get things done.

I don’t like PHP for much the same reason you don’t, but it delivers, and I’ve decided that the Perl-based blogging system I want needs have as good an interface as this one. The best is the enemy of the good and MT is good, but this is better. Maybe one day I’ll adapt my embryonic CMS to such an end…

MySQL Quirks

Posted by robbiebow on 9 July, 2009 under geek | Be the First to Comment

This is a slideshow I made for a talk I did at Milton Keynes Perl Mongers. I stole shamelessly from smylers who presented most of this at YAPC 2008 much better than I did at the OU in MK. Still, I think it’s quite neat.