The tech blog of Peter Shangov

Within the next week or so I am planning to announce the launch of an open-source perl project I have been working on recently and I want to create some publicity within the community. My blog currently appears only in the Planet Perl Iron Man feed, so I thought I should look into some other aggregators and get my blog included there too. There are two major problems I encountered that I want to share.

Statistics

Of the four major perl blog feeds I know of (use.perl.org, Iron Man, Perlsphere and Planet Perl), only Planet Perl provides statistics in the form a feedburner button displaying the number of readers. I am unable to find any similar information for any of the other feeds. There are a number of reasons why such information would be useful:

• blog authors will know which feeds are more popular and which ones they should seek to join

• blog authors will be able to tell what percentage of total subscribers tend to visit their blog and if necessary take measures to increase it

• this will be a good indication of how the community in general is expanding/shrinking

Joining

The other problem I encountered was joining. Perlshpere has an email address which one should write to to get their blog added, but I wrote to this address twice and did not get any response. Planet Perl gives no information on how to join at all, and the “Site Information and Contacts” link leads only to the main perl.org contacts page.

Any help/suggestions will be appreciated.