YAPC::EU in Pisa was my first YAPC ever and it was a truly fantastic experience. I met some great people, drank some great beer, and got to be a part of the incredible thing that the Perl community is. I am already looking forward to Riga next year.

A couple of observations:

I have started work on reinvigorating the seemingly dead Sofia.pm, the perl mongers group in Sofia, Bulgaria. Recently I took over the administration of the mailing list, and just now I have launched a fresh new website. There are many perl users here, as became evident from the first and second perl workshops that took place (ash++) in the last two years, so I am confident this will be an active and stable group.

This week’s post was supposed to be about something entirely different, but I had a huge ‘WOW!’ moment today that I just need to share. So I had to write a quick web scraping script but I happened to be working on a new Win32 machine that did not have Perl installed yet. I installed the latest Strawberry Perl and since I did not have a text editor configured on that machine either decided I will get Padre as well. I typed cpan Padre and I watched all of Padre’s dependencies install flawlessly without a hitch. For the first time ever. In my lifetime. (Padre itself did fail a bunch of tests, so in the end I had to force install it anyway, but Padre has never been advertised as stable software anyway).

A string of health problems kept me from coding and blogging for more than a month but I am finally back on track now and starting to work on my projects again.

I just released a new version of Miril, the static content management system, to CPAN, and while it does not contain any new features, it has seen a great deal of refactoring to make the code easier to read, as well as the addition of some developer documentation in Miril::Hacking. Hopefully this would make it a bit easier for others to join in.

Everybody likes screenshots, so here are some of Miril, the static content management system written in perl:

I am proud to announce the availability on CPAN of my latest project, Miril. Miril is a static content management system - it takes data from some source, e.g. a database or plain-text files, and generates static html. What makes Miril different from other tools that do a similar job (such as ruby’s Jekyll or homegrown solutions using the Template Toolkit), is that it provides a nice user interface for editing and managing content and you can safely install it for non-geeks to use.