Perl Maven

These are the source files of the articles published on http://perlmaven.com/ and its sub-domains.

Copyright Gabor Szabo except where the =author field explicitly shows someone else. Translations are copyright the translator (mentioned in the =translator field of each file) and Gabor Szabo, or the author of the specific article.

License: all the Perl 5 examples are free software. You can redistribute them under the same terms as Perl 5.10.

FORMAT

The format has evolved from POD, HTML and Docbook. It is now a mess. I know. I'll have to clean that up.

Nevertheless the overview:

In the header there are

=key value

pairs of meta information. Currently the order is important, but I (Gabor) can check it and rearrange it before publication. So don't worry about the order.

The text between

=abstract start

=abstract end

is displayed on the front pages and is included in the RSS/Atom feed.

<h2> is used for internal titles.

<hl></hl> stands for highlight and usually code-snippets inside the text are marked with these.

<b></b> is used to mark other important pieces.

Code snippets are wrapped in

<code lang="perl">
</code>

Add an 128x128 image of you to the sites/en/img/ folder and an entry for yourself in the authors.txt file in the root of the repository.

Mailing list

There is an invitation only, but publicly archived mailing list for the the people who would like to contribute to the Perl Maven site. A couple of ways to contribute:

• translate an article to a language
• proofreading in any language (including English)
• promote the articles in one or more languages
• site design
• site code (once it becomes open source)
• write original content for the English site

The mailing list can be found here:

http://mail.perlmaven.com/mailman/listinfo/perlmaven-contributor

If you'd like to participate, please contact Gabor.

TRANSLATIONS - LOCALIZATION

Each language has a subdirectory in the sites/ folder.

Initial language codes were a bit random, but we will try to stick to the way Wikipedia describes: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

• English en (the 'original' files)

• Simplified Chinese cn

• Traditional Chinese tw

• Esperanto eo

• French fr

• German de

• Hebrew he

• Indonesian id

• Italian it

• Korean ko

• Nepali ne

• Portuguese (Brazilian) br (sorry Bretons)

• Romanian ro

• Russian ru

• Spanish es

• Telugu te

• The file names (that become the URLs) should be in LOCAL_LANGUAGE, but use only ASCII characters. Transliterated to English. (I am not sure in this. Maybe a better thing would be to use LOCAL_LANGUAGE in the URLs?) http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192 .

• The file names should more-or-less match the title of the page, they can contain words separated with dashes.

• Please add the header to each file (the meta information) including the planned publication date

• The links in the page should be working. If there is already a translation for the target page then link there, if it only exists in English, then please use full URLs including the hostname http://perlmaven.com/ .

• Please update the hidden(!) section of the perl-tutorial.tt to include the links to the entries.

• The text listing the author and the translator are added by the system and are driven from the header tags =author and =translator.

• Each author and translator has to have an entry in the authors.txt file listing a nickname (\w characters only), The full name, the name of the image file containing their picture, link to their G+ profiles.

• Each author and translator needs to provide a picture in jpg or png format approximately 128x128 pixel size (an Avatar) to be shown at the bottom of each article.

• Each author and translator should set up authorship by linking their Google+ profile to the CC.perlmaven.com site. (e.g. br.perlmaven.com for the Brazilian Portuguese translators) See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

The translation process:

• The translator creates a new file in the sites/CC/drafts folder.

• When s/he has finished the translations s/he adds the link to the translation in the perl-tutorials.tt file in the open part, and moves the translated file to the sites/CC/pages folder. and updates the =timestamp in the translated file to the current date/time, or slightly in the future (maybe 12 hours) to allow Gabor the time to publish it. (This =timestamp is used to generate the front page, the atom feed, and the order in the archives page.

• in some cases we would want to synchronize the publication of the same article translated to several languages. In this case the translator should move the translated file to the sites/CC/done folder.

• Push to your repository and send a pull request.

• Gabor will periodically merge the pull requests and push the source to the live site. (Actually Gabor periodically merges from the public repositories of the translators in any case, but a pull request provides some opportunity to send messages.) He will try to check for html issues, but cannot check the correctness of the translations.

Comments

We use https://disqus.com/ as the commenting system. The English version is moderated by Gabor. If you'd like to enable comments on your language, and if you are willing to moderate it then please create an account on https://disqus.com/ and tell Gabor about it.

Moderation requires that you follow all the comments that arrive to the site and see if they need any attention. Spams are usually filtered by Disqus, but a few can slip through and there can be an occasional false positive, something that is marked as spam but it isn't really. The moderator also has to make sure that the comments stay civil and not hesitate to remove irrelevant or offending comments.

Getting started with the translation

• Sign up to GitHub, configure Git on your computer (name, email)
• Fork the https://github.com/szabgab/perl5maven.com repository and clone the fork to your computer
• Check on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias what should be the hostname for the language and talk to Gabor about this.
• cp -r skeleton sites/CC (where CC is the hostname selected)
• translate the first page sites/en/pages/installing-perl-and-getting-started.tt as sites/CC/drafts/installing-perl-and-getting-started.tt or as sites/CC/drafts/TRANSLATD-BUT-TRANSLITERATED-TITLE.tt as is acceptable in other sites in your language.
• Add =original and =translator entries to the translated file
• Add yourself to the authors.txt file and add a 128x128 picture of yourself to the sites/en/img/ folder.
• Please read option 2 here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986 and add the perlmaven.com site to the list of where you contribute.
• Update sites/CC/pages/perl-tutorial.tt to include the page in the commented-out section.
• Push your changes to your forked repository and send a pull request

PROMOTION

When articles are published they are posted to Google+, Twitter and sometimes even to Facebook. They are also posted on LinkedIN.

An e-mail is sent out to the people who registered on the Perl Maven site.

Many of the articles are included the Perl Weekly newsletter.

Once in a while I post a link to Reddit ( http://www.reddit.com/ ) but I'd rather see others post there if they find the article worth the mention. The same with Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/

The translators also need to take on themselves a large part of the promotion in the language communities. Both in the Perl community - to get help from others - and to the general public.

This can be by posting on the language sub-Reddit (e.g. on http://www.reddit.com/r/Romania )

Sharing the articles on Google+, Twitter and Facebook should be almost automatic.

Getting the RSS feed of the site to be included in some local 'planets'.

SEO explained in 5 words

"Get links from trusted sources" ~ Jon Morrow

The best promotion is if people find it worth to mention one of the articles in a blog post or in some other form.

Git and Github

There is good and free book about Git called Git Pro http://git-scm.com/book

Install Git on you desktop configure username and password generate ssh key: https://help.github.com/articles/generating-ssh-keys

Create a Github account, let's say your username is USERNAME: Upload the ssh key to your account On Github 'fork' the https://github.com/szabgab/perl5maven.com repository It will create another repository https://github.com/USERNAME/perl5maven.com

clone it to your desktop:

$ git clone [email protected]:USERNAME/perl5maven.com.git

It will create a directory called perl5maven.com inside all the source files. There should be one called sites/CC (where CC is your language code based on this list: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias more or less). If there is no such directory ask Gabor to create one.

Initially you will need to know about

$ git add  filename
$ git commit -m "message"
$ git push

And on Github there is a button to "Send Pull request" that will notify me to look at what you pushed, but of course I am also available by e-mail and GTalk.

To follow the changes in the central repository and keep your own fork up-to-date, do the following:

In your working copy do this once:

$ git remote add upstream git://github.com/szabgab/perl5maven.com.git

Then every time you'd like to sync:

$ git fetch upstream
$ git merge upstream/main

Github workflow for translator and reviewer

For some of the languages there are more than one translators, and they like to review their translations before pushing it out. This is a recommended workflow for them.

Let's say there are two people involved one has a username 'translator' the other one username 'reviewer' on Github

translator:

fork      https://github.com/szabgab/perl5maven.com
creating  https://github.com/translator/perl5maven.com

reviewer:

fork      https://github.com/szabgab/perl5maven.com
creating  https://github.com/reviewer/perl5maven.com

translator:

do the translation, put the file in the sites/CC/drafts/ folder and push it to Github

reviewer:

$ git remote add joe_the_translator git://github.com/translator/perl5maven.com.git
$ git fetch joe_the_translator
$ git merge joe_the_translator/main

Now the reviewer also has the file in her drafts/ folder locally The reviewer can make changes locally, commit them and push them to Github.

translator:

$ git remote add sally_the_reviewer git://github.com/reviewer/perl5maven.com.git
$ git fetch sally_the_reviewer
$ git merge sally_the_reviewer/main

Now the translator has the changes from the reviewer.

The fetch and merge parts can be repeated, the git remote add part only needs to be done once.

Once the translation is ready. The file can be moved from drafts/ to pages/ by either the translator or the reviewer:

$ git mv sites/CC/drafts/article.tt sites/CC/pages/article.tt

pushed it to Github and a merge request can be sent to Gabor.