PerlTricks.com is a year old

Mar 21, 2014 by David Farrell

PerlTricks.com launched a year ago. So how are we doing? Read on to find out.

Site Visitors

For our first 6 months our visitor count oscillated between 2,500 and 3,000 visitors per month. Since then the numbers surged to 17,000:

My guess is that two factors account for most of the growth: writing a broader range of Perl related articles beyond simple tutorials and the site re-design which occurred in December. In the next year, I’d like to grow the visitor numbers to 70,000 per month. I think this is realistic based on numbers for other Perl sites.

Our pages-per-visit metric remained steady at ~1.5 for the year. This is curious as we added the “Our Latest Articles” and “Most Popular Articles” side bars in December and they have not been effective at encouraging users to read more of our articles. I’m thinking about adding some kind of “related articles” link to the footer of the page - maybe that will yield better results.

In terms of Geography, there are no surprises really. Most of our visitors came from the U.S. followed by the U.K.,India, Germany and Canada:

Our Articles

We published 76 articles, the most popular of which was about Mario Roy’s wonderful MCE module. I hope the article’s success stems from the great content and not the click-bait title! Here’s our top ten most popular articles:

1. Make your code run faster with Perl’s secret turbo module
2. Cool new Perl feature: postfix dereferencing
3. Display beautiful Perl code in HTML without JavaScript
4. Perl levels-up with native subroutine signatures
5. Perl hash basics: create, update, loop, delete and sort
6. Perl for loops
7. Schedule jobs like a boss with every
8. Download a YouTube video with one line of Perl
9. Catch and Handle Signals in Perl
10. How to redirect and restore STDOUT

We also started a regular feature: What’s new on CPAN. This got a lot of positive feedback and we’ll keep running it. We’ll continue to cover Perl community news and programming, but this year I’d also like to give more coverage to the work of TPF, particularly the Perl 5 development fund. With Perl v5.20 around the corner, it would be great if we could turn that momentum into significant funding for TPF.

Finally we’re also going to be offering paid freelance writing opportunities to the Perl community - watch this space!

How you can help

There are several ways you can help us:

• Email us about Perl projects, community events or modules that you’d like us to feature. This month we’re nearing 20,000 visitors; that’s a lot of eyes to have on your shiny new Perl app or undiscovered module.
• Promote our articles by linking, retweeting or upvoting them whenever you deem them worthy of it. This helps us introduce more people to our site.
• Keep doing amazing things with Perl. A stronger community helps everyone including us.

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who has supported us over the past year on twitter, Reddit and by email. In particular I’d like to thank: Andy Lester of Perl Buzz and Yanick Champoux and Gabor Szabo of Perl Weekly for regularly featuring our articles. Both sites are great ways to stay informed of the latest happenings in the Perl community. I’d also like to thank brian d foy for running the Perl Nerd Merit Badge Contest (which provided the prizes for our own contest). We recently interviewed brian to discuss his new book, Mastering Perl second edition. brian shared his views on the book, technical writing and many other Perly topics.

Finally I’d like to thank Jeffrey Thalhammer for his mentorship and encouragement. His startup, Stratopan.com provides cloud-based configuration management for Perl.

See you in Orlando for YAPC::NA 2014!

Enjoyed this article? Help us out and retweet it!

**

Cover image © Katie Bordner

This article was originally posted on PerlTricks.com.