[sf-perl] sf.pm.org

[Fred Moyer]

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 11:38 AM, Paul Makepeace <paulm at paulm.com> wrote:
>> Sounds good - can you point us to their contact info?
>
> https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/ suggests it's free for lite use so maybe
> no need to even talk to anyone (geeks rejoice)

Ah good call. I'll see if I can get that going.

>> We may be able to avoid this need by assigning a non pm.org DNS
>> hostname to the current sf.pm.org site.
>
> I've always thought of registering new domains to work around that kind of
> thing is an admission of failure. "sf.pm.org" is a pretty cool domain
> already: short, brand recognition, google juice, etc. Actually I think the
> pm.org folks aren't that bad - we just need a couple of name servers under
> someone's control here and a quick email and I bet it'd get done.

I was suggesting the legacy site move to a non-pm.org hostname, so we
wouldn't have to ask the PM gods for old.sf.pm.org or something
similar. The sf.pm.org hostname would continue to host the 'current'
site.


>
> Paul
>
>>
>> > I think most of those are independent : )
>>
>> Independent is good!
>>
>> >
>> > Paul
>> >
>> > Written on my phone
>> >
>> > On May 9, 2012 8:18 AM, "Fred Moyer" <fred at redhotpenguin.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 5:12 AM, Jonathan Swartz <swartz at pobox.com>
>> >> wrote:
>> >> > http://sf.pm.org/ seems sort of abandoned - e.g. incorrect 8pm
>> >> > schedule,
>> >> > a pointer to another seemingly abandoned upcoming.org page, and the
>> >> > owner's
>> >> > pining for Perl on his Palm III. :)
>> >> >
>> >> > Should it just redirect to the meetup page at this point?
>> >>
>> >> Are you volunteering to take on the webmaster duties? :) This is
>> >> actually a situation which is more involved than it looks on the
>> >> surface. Gather round here folks and I'll detail the long version.
>> >>
>> >> The current sf.pm.org website is hosted on a custom built CMS
>> >> (Greymatter) that is probably a decade old. I think half the people on
>> >> this list have built their own CMS at some point or another. We had a
>> >> partial design for a new website a few years ago, but that never
>> >> really took hold. I've been using the App::PM::Announce tool to post
>> >> the meeting announcements to sf.pm.org as well as Meetup, LinkedIn,
>> >> and use.perl.org. So the meetings page was consistently up to date for
>> >> probably the last 3 years.
>> >>
>> >> Until last year, when LinkedIn decided to add a captcha to their
>> >> application, so we couldn't cross post announcements there. Then
>> >> use.perl.org went belly up, and Meetup decided to obfuscate their
>> >> login process with form tokens (thanks a lot meetup). I spent some
>> >> time updating the announcement tool and put in a github pull request,
>> >> but the original version is still on CPAN.
>> >>
>> >> So at that point I started posting the meeting announcements only on
>> >> Meetup by hand, this was July of 2011. I usually tweet the
>> >> announcement also at http://twitter.com/sfperlmongers. Back to your
>> >> question though, why don't we redirect sf.pm.org to Meetup?
>> >>
>> >> Two reasons. I made a promise to keep the original sf.pm.org site on
>> >> the web, which means creating another DNS entry for legacy.sf.pm.org
>> >> or something similar. DNS for pm.org is handled by perl mongers
>> >> volunteers, who often have scare time available and want things done
>> >> in a certain way to make life easy for them; custom requests aren't
>> >> always handled quickly and efficiently. If this sounds like an IT
>> >> department at a large company, you're starting to get the picture.
>> >>
>> >> The second reason is that Meetup is a paid service costing about
>> >> $100/year (covered by one of our sponsors Red Hot Penguin), and I was
>> >> somewhat hesitant to shift the sf.pm.org presence to them. They like
>> >> to change things without telling me, and I never really got the time
>> >> to investigate if they can properly handle CNAMEs.
>> >>
>> >> Add into all this that Joe and I spend the bulk of our SF.pm tuits
>> >> organizing meetings, and now you can start to see why we haven't put a
>> >> lot of work into sf.pm.org. We've been lucky to have sponsorship from
>> >> O'Reilly, Mother Jones, Red Hot Penguin, and Six Apart (Say Media) for
>> >> a long time, but it still takes manpower to make this operation work.
>> >> We also got some great t-shirts from Blekko and dotCloud (thanks
>> >> guys!), but there haven't really been any other Perl supporters that
>> >> have stepped up.
>> >>
>> >> I'll see what I can do about polishing up sf.pm.org. Maybe this email
>> >> will inspire someone to put together a nice shiny new website for us
>> >> :)
>> >> _______________________________________________
>> >> SanFrancisco-pm mailing list
>> >> SanFrancisco-pm at pm.org
>> >> http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/sanfrancisco-pm
>
>