Posts Tagged ‘support’

Unknown power

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

So, you’re using Perl? For web applications? You’re not alone, many people do the same, but…

no one knows!

So many people use Perl for so many web projects, but only very few people actually show or tell it.

We (the Padre IRC channel) shortly discovered that there are plenty more or less “official” icons and buttons for showing this to the world:

The Perl foundation (TPF) gives us

and  

And O’Reilly licensed some camels for free usage:

and    and   and  

(and some others)

All of them have their licenses but as a summary one could say that you could put them on your website if you

  • Run a non-commercial project (most but not all are also approved for commercial projects)
  • and make the graphic a link to http://www.perl.org (Perl foundation buttons)  or http://www.perl.com (O’Reilly buttons)

Please follow the links above and read the full license before using them.

Gabor Szabo colltected some Powered-by-Perl icons here but I don’t know about the sources an licensing. You might violate TPF, O’Reilly or others rights when using them, so add them on your own risk.

I like this one . If you got any rights on it, please tell be and I’ll remove it.

Why should you promote Perl?

Why are you using Perl?

It’s a great language but too few people are using it.

(Nearly) every PHP project is using “.php” – URLs which tell people: This (maybe great) site is running PHP!

But Perl based sites? They use mod_perl (which has no file extension by default) or CGI-scripts (which aren’t recognized as Perl scripts).

It would be great if you’ld add one of the buttons to your Perl projects. If you don’t want it on every page, simply add it to the about, imprint or contact page.

If you’re not allowed to add a button (maybe it’s not your project but you’re managing it), you might be allowed to add it to the Perl Foundation list of Perl users – it’s free and it’s free advertising for your company or project.

You don’t have any Perl based website?

But you might know someone who runs a Perl based project or website! Tell him (or her) to add a button or point her/him to this blog post.

24/7 commercial quality support – for an open source project

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Yesterday a fellow developer had a problem with a well known very big open source project. He tried to get support from that project, but nobody answered. It was one of those tools installed on most Linux servers – but the community wasn’t able to answer simple questions.

The Padre IRC channel window was next to his IM window when he told me and I was thinking about Padre support.

The Padre support channel (called #Padre on irc.perl.org) is open 24/7, and there are about 45 people and one or two bots around, but at least some of them are always alive and ready to answer questions.

There are two facts that gave us this high reachability (I think):

1. Our developers are all around the world

Some Australians are really pushing Padre, including Alias who did 16% of the core code and waxhead, our current release manager. We got some few US guys and a strong European and Middle Eastern group. Most of them are online and usually happy to help users when they’re at their desks.

2. Padre is a working tool

This is true for many open source things, but Padre is something you use everyday and – compared to tools like “less” or “traceroute” – you recognize it. Many people use Padre for working, it’s always visible while it’s being used – compared to Apache or syslogd that are hidden if they’re working probably.

Some people using Padre also open their IRC client or the Mibbit web-based IRC client for joining the Padre support, asking  questions and answering others.

Give us a try

Padre is a complex IDE. If you try it out, you’ll likely have questions or maybe even problems. Feel free to come to our support channel and ask your question. It might take some minutes or even half an hour until someone replies – as many people are busy with work – but I guess you’ll get your answer. And you’re welcome to stay there and spend a minute on answering a question of someone else.