IronMan – the mark II!

The time is nigh and soon it will be the first anniversary of the IronMan blogging project (18th April 2009).

The North West England Perl Mongers group have been working on a replacement codebase for IronMan since the December Hackday in 2009.  This will permit us to replace the existing Plagger installation with a Perlanet data gatherer along with a Catalyst based web UI that can host blog archives and improve the general usability of the site.

So let’s start by giving a link to the lightening talk I gave at the NWE.pm March 2010 technical meeting which details the system architecture and components.

So, if you missed it in the presentation, checkout the beta site. We’re looking to launch this site to the live IronMan site on the 14th of April 2010 and would appreciate comments and even patches if you’re so inclined (repository at http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/repos/bast/ironman/). It seems to be a social meeting for NWE.pm on the 15th of April so we’ll be having a small celebration of the release

Comments to #epo-ironman on irc.perl.org or indeed on this blog if that doesn’t take your fancy.

Further considerations and possible features:

• Language tagging of posts to enable filtering and possible translation (See comments here and also here)
• Archives of all posts (the future http://all.things.per.ly)
• Improved spam handling

Comments have been made regarding the competitive nature of IronMan. I’m sure that mst and mdk had comments about this and were talking about introducing a set of new badges for those who don’t wish to partake in the competition but still wish to have their blog aggregated or indeed archived may still do so.

Finally, I’d like to take a moment to say a big thankyou to a few people (in no particular order):

• Mark Keating (mdk)
• Matt Trout (mst)
• Iain …(iain)
• Graham …(grim)
• Carl … (fade)
• Oliver … (aCiD2)
• Jess Robinson (castaway)
• Dave Cross (davorg)
• YOUR_NAME_HERE (that’s my own very special way of thanking those I’ve missed, and also those who will volunteer… oh my, yes…)