Perl Tips and Techniques

As I state in the permanent introduction at the top of this page, this blog is hard to write. The entries take much longer to write than most of my other blogs. The approach I have to take is:

1. Come up with a web-related programming problem to be solved
2. Affirm that I know how to solve the problem in Perl
3. Sketch out a solution
4. Write, test and modify the Perl code
5. Write the blog entry
6. Write a directly related entry in my MySQL-Tips blog, if necessary
7. If I have time, convert the Perl code into PHP and rewrite the entry for my PHP-Tips blog.

So as you can see, I've got a fair bit of work to do. As well, blogs display entries in reverse-chronological order. It's not always easy for a reader to read a long series of related posts backwards. So I also have to decide how to present the content for three levels of reader:

1. Mildly interested in at least the concepts.
2. Somewhat interested in the methodology and a peek at the database.
3. Very interested in all of the back-end stuff, including the programming.

Many of the entries that I plan to post here will be intimately tied to several of my other blogs. This modular approach allows "mildly interested" and "somewhat interested" readers to skip what they don't care about. But this punishes "very interested" readers by making them jump around the blogosphere for the related posts. (Yeah, but you're all big boys and girls... you can handle it. After a case study has had all it's related blog entries posted, I'll put together a PDF for it and post it on my consulting web site (with links at all the appropriate blogs). You can download the PDFs for a small donation, just to cover my bandwidth costs.)

That said, here are some of the related web-related "problems" that I hope to be solving here over the next few months:

1. Customizing Perl (and PHP) scripts for parsing web server log files.
2. Web server log database (at MySql-Tips blog)
3. Capturing visitor info for blogs that are hosted on OPSes (Other People's Servers).
4. Producing detailed blog visitor histories (at NetMetrics blog)
5. Geo-plotting visitors - determining where your visitors are coming from (at GeoPlotting blog).
6. Producing an animation of web visits (a map of the world with icons popping up, in an animated fashion, over their home country) (at GeoPlotting blog)

(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://perl-tips.blogspot.com/

This blog is probably one of the harder of my collection of blogs to write. Anyone that already knows Perl may or may not find the postings here useful. Anyone who doesn’t know Perl will likely find the postings too advanced. Where do I draw the line? My feeling is that the only way I can approach this blog without second-guessing myself is to solve specific problems using Perl. That means each entry is likely to be fairly long, unless I simply summarize or even point you to the appropriate Perl modules or resources that you’ll need. Additionally, if you’re reading this blog and want to know how to do something in Perl in particular, feel free to post a comment. If I know how to do it, I’ll at least get you started. Note that initially, I will not be blogging here regularly until I have a collection of entries ready to post.

Addendum: Actually, due to idiots sending me absolutely unrelated comment-spam, I've temporarily disabled comments. Get me at rdash001-at-yahoo-dot-ca if you have Perl questions.

cheers,

the chameleon