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