Just a Theory

Trans rights are human rights

A Perl Blog

I have been unsatisfied with Just a Theory for some time. I started that blog in 2004 more or less for fun, thinking it would be my permanent home on the internet. And it has been. But the design, while okay in 2004, is just awful by today’s standards. A redesign is something I have planned to do for quite some time.

I had also been thinking about my audience. Or rather, audiences. I’ve blogged about many things, but while a few dear family members might want to read everything I ever post, most folks, I think, are interested in only a subset of topics. Readers of Just a Theory came for posts about Perl, or PostgreSQL, or culture, travel, or politics. But few came for all those topics, in my estimation.

More recently, a whole bunch of top-level domains have opened up, often with the opportunity for anyone to register them. I was lucky enough to snag theory.pm and theory.pl, thinking that perhaps I would create a site just for blogging about Perl. I also nabbed theory.so, which I might dedicate to database-related blogging, and theory.me, which would be my personal blog (travel, photography, cultural essays, etc.).

And then there is Octopress. A blogging engine for hackers. Perfect for me. Hard to imagine something more appropriate (unless it was written in Perl). It seemed like a good opportunity to partition my online blogging.

So here we are with my first partition. theory.pm is a Perl blog. Seemed like the perfect name. I fiddled with it off and on for a few months, often following Matt Gemmell’s Advice, and I’m really happy with it. The open-source fonts Source Sans Pro and Source Code Pro, from Adobe, look great. The source code examples are beautifully marked up and displayed using the Solarized color scheme (though presentation varies in feed readers). Better still, it’s equally attractive and readable on computers, tablets and phones, thanks to the foundation laid by Aron Cedercrantz’s BlogTheme.

I expect to fork this code to create a database blog soon, and then perhaps put together a personal blog. Maybe the personal blog will provide link posts for posts on the other sites, so that if anyone really wants to read everything, they can. I haven’t decided yet.

In the meantime, now that I have a dedicated Perl blog, I guess I’ll have to start writing more Perl-related stuff. I’m starting with some posts about the state of exception handling in Perl 5, the first of which is already up. Stay tuned for more.

Update: 2018-05-23: I decided that a separate Perl blog wasn’t a great idea after all, and relaunched Just a Theory.