Unattributed copying of perl blog content via Planet Perl

I recall other bloggers complaining of unattributed redistribution of their work. Now a site called rapid-dev.net has started redistributing Plant Perl posts, including mine, with an advert at the top.

I wouldn’t mind if the page had clear attribution, but it doesn’t. In fact, at the bottom it says “Author: hoanatwho”.

That doesn’t feel right. Especially as many of my posts, and probably many others from Planet Perl, use the first-person pronoun “I”.

Why does this matter? A couple of months ago Merlin Mann wrote a long but excellent piece that explains why far better than I could.

Nobody but me is allowed to decide why I make things. And — if and when I choose to give away the things that I make — nobody but me is allowed to define how or where I’ll do it. I am independent.

Merlin discusses, with his typical style, the motivations of those who make their work available for free, and the perils of presuming to understand their motives. Although written mostly about bloggers it seems very applicable to authors of Open Source software. For me it echoes how I feel about coding and, to an extent, the freedom that Perl give me to express my thoughts.

If you have a blog I recommend you at least make the licence for reuse clear. My blog has a “Terms of Use” link in the sidebar that refers to Creative Commons “Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0” license.

Looking at the Planet Perl page I see it has no licence. Perhaps that should be fixed — even if only to say that the license of the feeds being aggregated must be respected.

Thanks, Iron Man, for the good excuse to perl blog

I’ve been thinking that I haven’t blogged much lately. Assorted half-baked ideas would cross my mind and then evaporate before I’d find the time, or motivation, to actually start writing.

The folks at the Enlightened Perl Organisation have solved the motivation problem by announcing the Iron Man Blogging Challenge: in short, “maintain a rolling frequency of 4 posts every 32 days, with no more than 10 days between posts“.

So about one post a week. I can aim for that!

Can you? “The rules are very simple: you blog, about Perl. Any aspect of Perl you like. Long, short, funny, serious, advanced, basic: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to be in English, either, if that’s not your native language.” Why not try? Help yourself and help perl at the same time.

I’ll try to capture the half-baked ideas for perl blog posts as they cross my mind, then build on them as time and mood allow. Hopefully about one a week will mature into an actual blog post.

Meanwhile…

I remembered that almost exactly a year ago schwern blogged that he was “horrified at the junk which shows up when you search for perl blog on Google“. It seems the situation hasn’t improved much since. The planet.perl.org site is top, but the rest are a bit of a mishmash.

The problem is partly that “perl blog” isn’t a great search term. Google naturally gives preference to words that appear in urls and titles (all else being equal), but blogs rarely explicitly call themselves blogs on their pages or urls. I suspect many on the first page of results are there because ‘blog’ appears in the url. (To help out I’ve included “perl blog” in the title of this post :)

Searching for “perl blogs” (plural) works better because it finds pages talking about perl blogs, which is useful when searching for perl blogs.

One entry in the “perl blogs” results was the Perl Foundation’s wiki page listing perl blogs. That was new to me. This blog wasn’t on it so I’ve added it. Got a perl blog, or know someone who has, that’s not listed on that page? Go and add it, now! It’ll only take a moment.

Along similar lines, I’ve added the phrases “perl blog” and “perl programming” to the sidebar of my blog pages. The first is to help people searching for “perl blog”. The second is mostly for my own amusement.