Bricolage: Localhostin’ it and other news

About the author

Phillip Smith works at the intersection of technology, social change, and media justice. Since 2004, he has worked as an Internet strategy consultant for New Internationalist.

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Related entries

• Perl: Love it, or hate it, but don't ignore it.

  2009-11-26

  Call me a curmudgeon (and many do), but I just can't understand why intelligent folks make the choice to completely ignore Perl. I can understand if you don't want to use it yourself -- that's all cool -- but I wish folks would at least give it the nod it deserves.

  Case in point: I was reading Simon Wilson's excellent blog post about Node.js -- an "evented I/O for V8 javascript” and was surprised that he only referenced Twisted (Python) and EventMachine (Ruby) when talking about non-blocking event-driven frameworks.

  Why no mention of Perl?

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  Phillip Smith

• Promoting projects that are written in Perl

  2009-10-22

  I got a great e-mail from Gabor earlier this week that proposed a simple challenge: Let's not get distracted trying to promote Perl itself, but -- instead -- let's focus on promoting projects written in Perl.

  One of those projects -- the one I'm most excited about on a day-to-day basis -- is Bricolage, the enterprise-class content management system. Gabor's note -- which asked about the status of the project -- makes me wonder why more folks in the Perl community aren't taking a closer look at what is undoubtedly one of the most capable publishing systems on the market today?

  So, in the interest of beating the drum for a Perl project that's alive and well, I wanted to summarize what I think is exciting about the Bricolage project right now:

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  Phillip Smith

• Perl in your city

  2009-10-13

  Over the years, I've been involved with a fair number of Bricolage implementations for different organizations. (For those that don't know, Bricolage is a large, Perl-based, publishing system.) Many of these organizations don't have a full-time Perl programmer on staff, and instead rely on external contracts to do the heavy lifting that comes up from time-to-time. However, most of these organizations have a "Web producer" or "Web manager" -- a generalist who helps with content updates, and smaller scale Web site changes -- and, almost without fail, that person eventually asks: How can I learn more about Perl?

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• A Perl-based editor for Perl, on a Mac. 

  2009-10-06

  Giving credit where credit is due: The folks behind Padre, the Perl IDE, are leading by example when it comes to doing community engagement well. Twice now, folks from the Padre project have dropped me a note to ask about this or that, which is a great way to catch people's attention So, with such great outreach, I'd feel like a complete schmoe if I didn't at least give Padre a whirl.

  Unfortunately, getting Padre running is currently pretty difficult -- I'd say a tad more difficult than installing Bricolage, which has historically been a non-trivial exercise. No doubt the Padre install process is going to get a whack easier soon, given the high number of commits the project sees in a given week.

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  Phillip Smith

• Free software Fridays. Let's promote participation.

  2009-09-28

  One of the most enjoyable benefits of working with a not-for-profit workers' co-operative is being able to invest some time into activities that aren't exclusively tied to generating revenue. New Internationalist has long-relied on free and open source software and this year we will try to formalize our efforts to contribute back to projects that have helped along the way. The concept is "Free Software Fridays," which is something we hope will catch on at other organizations.

  The concept is simple: those of us that work on technology-related aspects of New Internationalist's operation invest two hours per week, or one day a month, into supporting the free software projects that we rely on, or toward releasing the tools that we've developed internally as free software. The idea itself is open source, in the sense that we've taken the broad strokes from the idea of "Open Source Fridays" started by our friends at the Web Collective in Seattle and re-purposed them to fit with the work culture at NI.

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  Phillip Smith

• The Perl ecosystem toolbar: Now it's your turn.

  2009-09-08

  A couple weeks back, I asked the question "Where is the big 'Explore Perl' button?" and followed up last week with a short demo of the kind of thing I was thinking about. Some folks liked it: so today it's one step closer to "reality." And now it's your turn to take it to the next level.

  After Adam mentioned that he was running a humourous mock-up of the "Perl Ecosystem Toolbar" on the CPAN Top 100 site, I thought "crap, I better see if I can actually make this thing work."

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  Phillip Smith