The Perl Journal On The Ropes

rochlin writes "Looks like The Perl Journal might not make it up for air after all. This blurb is on their website. 'Time is running short and we need your help if The Perl Journal is to get another chance at being the real deal. As of a couple of minutes ago, we only have 881 subscriptions and the deadline is fast approaching. Please subscribe now. It only costs 3 cents per day to get the best Perl coverage anywhere.'" They need 3,000 subscribers to move forward.

Comments

Re:I've been at odds with CMP ever since BYTE

[Anonymous Coward]

yea, right. Last time I paid for my Perl journal subscription, they got sold to earthweb, took my money and refused to send a magazine, refused to return calls, refused to return email. Why should I re-subscribe to a magazine thats till owes me a years subscription?

How could it work?

[ageitgey]

From the website:

Well, sort of. We need your help. TPJ is totally reader supported. To provide TPJ to you, we need 3,000 subscribers. Bean counters and suits being what they are, our bosses won't let us publish the e-zine if we don't have enough subscribers. It's as simple as that.

3,000 readers * $12.00 subscription = $36,000 yearly income before taxes and bandwidth costs.

How could they survive on that? You couldn't even pay one decent perl programmer to write articles. Who is paying all the "bean counters and suits"?

maybe expand coverage to Ruby and Python

[raistlinthegreat]

Python and Ruby are becoming more and more popular. especially Ruby has many fans who came
from a Perl background.
maybe "The Perl Journal" should be a "Ruby, Perl, Python" Journal.

Re:I've been at odds with CMP ever since BYTE

[GigsVT]

Yeah, they offered me some subscription to some lame Windows magazine, I stuck their card in an envelope and wrote them a letter demanding a refund instead.

I'm still waiting, CMP, if you are reading this. :)

Although, BYTE had been degenerating into a Java and buzzword circle jerk, with few interesting articles.

Just about didn't get my subscription

[wang33]

God I hate it non compliant websites, it wouldn't let me subscribe using opera, had to fire up IE.
That just about cost them my subscription. You would think a mag devoted to perl would be able to handle browsers other than IE since perl is mainly used *nix systems you would think a great majority of users would be using konqueror, galeon, mozilla, hell even lynx. But alas i don't want to see it die so I still subscribed.

Did anyone use a non IE browser and it have it work for them?

Wang33

One day the party will end

[RealBeanDip]

The problem is there are all sorts of free resources that provide whatever it is the TPJ hopes to provide. What the people who hope to keep the TPJ alive need to ask themselves is "what are we going to provide that isn't already available for free."

Yes, one day the party will end and you will have to pay for information of value on the 'net. However that day is quite far away and I suspect the TPJ will in fact... die.

It was good while it lasted.

Stay tuned; I expect we'll see "RIP TPJ" here on slashdot shortly.

Re:Just Die Already

[Golias]

Not to mention perl.org and a dozen other free sites which provide more perl info than any one person is likely to get around to reading. Why would I spend a dime on a journal of Stuff I Can Read Elsewhere For Free?

In fact, the massive amount of free documentation and information is one of the factors that drew a lot of people to Perl in the first place. You too can be YAPH without ever buying a single publication. (Okay, maybe the Camel Book is a nice jump-start, but it's amazing how much you can accomplish with just that and web resources.)

Don't be so quick to show your rich tastes.

[Inoshiro]

If you were living in Canada, that'd be over $55,000.

To put this in perspective, you can live a decent life in a nice house that you are paying off for $18,000 a year (yes, that includes internet access, food, utilities, etc).

Even after taxes you still have 10-15 grand to just piss away! I know that some US centres are very expensive to live in (NYC, Boston), but is everywhere in the US so damned expensive that you can't live on less than an appreciable fraction of a million dollars?

old media model not working ...

[beanerspace]

There is an interesting article over at HealYourChurchWebSite describing how a local newspaper in the D.C. area has turned from free content to subscription only access. In the blog, the author complains that the local paper suffers because the content is not compelling, but rather a rehash of AP and Washington Post stories.

Could this be the problem with the Perl Journal? Are they really only offering a rehash of articles you can find at PerlMonks, PerlCircus and other online news/user sources? Look at two titles from Fall 2002.

• Parsing RSS Files with XML::RSS
• Does SOAP Suck?

I mean, can't I get the same skinny the first topic from XML.com and the other from Scripting.com?

Or is it because Perl itself has reached a plateu? I mean, other than ActiveState, who's doing anything innovative and hot with regards to Perl development tools on a commercial basis? I mean aside from the obligatory Shareware editors?

Perhaps it because much of the "action" is occuring in the Open Source arena, such as the CPAN and SourceForge that leave the Perl Journal much less to write about than they did 10 years ago?

I mean I'm sorry to see it go, but I can't honestly say I'm going to be handicapped without it.