20 Years Of Perl

I slacked off yesterday, and forgot to write up a blog post about this, but December 18 marked the 20th birthday of the Perl programming language! Woohoo!

I’ve personally been using Perl for about ten years, and for the past seven years I’ve been using it in my job at Christianbook.com. I love coding in Perl, and I’ve learned how to make it do some really crazy things over the years! I guess you could say that Perl helps me “put bread on the table,” so I owe Larry Wall some thanks for creating such a great language and guiding it through all of these years of development.

Here’s to 20 more great years!

Backup Scripts

Here are the scripts I mentioned in Backup Strategy.

Continue reading…

MFPM (My Favorite Perl Modules)

I guarantee that this post will only be interesting if you’re into coding or general hard-core geekery. I’ll spare everyone else the horror of taking up space on our home page with any other details. Continue reading…

My Code Archive

Over the years, I’ve written a bunch of Perl and PHP code for my own personal use. Some of it might be useful to others, some of it might be useless. Some of it doesn’t even work. It might be educational for folks who want to learn Perl or PHP, or need examples of how to code something.

Anyway, I wanted to put it all in one place so that people could find it and use it, if it is of any use. I’ve had fun writing up this archive, because I’ve come across some code that I wrote a long time ago, when I was ignorant of better ways to do things… but interesting code nonetheless. If you do end up using any of this code, take a minute and leave a comment on this entry. I’d love to know what folks are using this stuff for.

I’ll try to keep this entry up-to-date if I add or remove any code from the archive.

Enjoy! Continue reading…

Random flickr photos

I wrote up a bit of code for Sooz so that she could display random flickr photos on her page. I thought other folks might be interested in this, so here’s the link to the source:

random flickr photos

The script uses MagpieRSS and some PHP functions to grab a flickr feed, randomly select some photos, and display them. It should be fairly straightforward if you want to customize it for your site.