timetracker.plix.at

Today I launched http://timetracker.plix.at.

timetracker.plix.at contains information about App::TimeTracker, the easily extendable command line based time tracker we use a lot. You maybe remember App::TimeTracker from one of the talks I gave at YAPC::Europe 2011 in Riga (App-TimeTracker, Metaprogramming & Method Modifiers). It's a real nice app, give it a try if need a sane way to keep track of your working hours, and want to automate other boring administrative tasks in one go.

The site is build using a Pod::Simple based POD parser that parses the POD (mostly the one in tracker) and dumps the content into my custom (and not yet released) blog engine, which then takes over and builds the static HTML pages. Rather simple, but IMO also rather effective. I don't have to maintain the content in two different places, and I'm motivated to write docs so the website looks good.

Setting up this site was a bit of work (about 10 hours or so), but it was definitely worth it. I even enjoyed hacking the jQuery powered console thingy on the startpage...

If you're maintaining a CPAN distribution or some Perl tool, I encourage you to set up a small website for it. It's really easy using something like ttree, or by writing a custom Pod2YourSite converter.

Yes, I know that the various CPAN front-ends already provide us with usable pseudo-sites, but to be honest: they all are rather ugly and definitely not suited to non-programmers - or even people who are programmers but not members of the Perl echo chamber. Most people (again, outside the elite club of the Perl Masons) just aren't interested in META.json or a test result matrix or have any need to grep the source. They want some quick reasons why your piece of software is cool and what their benefits are if they use it.

Anyway, I'm planning to do similar sites for other tools and things I have authored. And I really think it would be a good thing if more Perl projects also had distinct, cool websites!

(some parts of this post might have been cross-posted from here)