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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.
That is pretty cheap, but I don't need 30 3 cent charges on my credit card every month.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Sorry for the doom and gloom, but Perl.com has pretty much nailed down the business of keeping Perl users up to date with news and events. There doesn't appear to be a need for the Perl Journal anymore, and no one is going to subscribe with real cash after the debacles of the past couple of years.
It's not the fact that they stopped publishing it, but how they treated the subscribers.
Anyone else get fscked out of a year or two of BYTE?
For more on the story, click here
Hmm, $12 a year, same price as a subscription to Wired. Now I wonder, which will you get more info from that will actually help you in your job? (hint: the journal)
Who needs Perl Journal when there's Perl Monks? Great resource!
-- This Sig is currently under construction
I really enjoyed the orginial rag. I have all the issues and they are fun to flip through even today.
I have a problem with my original subscription just vanishing in the middle like it did. Normally you would get some crap alternate magazine when your magazine hits the dirt. But instead I get the offer of yet another subscription that could fizz out.
I think I'll wait and buy the back issues. At least I know they'exist.
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"?
Uninnovate - Only the finest in engineering.
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.
Change the publication's name to..
.NET Presents The Perl Journal
Microsoft
no?
I know that I wont subscribe just to see my subscription fizzle out like last time. and i am sure there are many others out there who also are feeling the same way.
TPJ was awesome, the problem is that how things ended before is making a whole bunch of us not wanting to take the plunge but stand back and watch.
yes It's only $30 some odd dollars.. and to most here they burn that much lighting their Illegally Impotred Cubans.. But to the very few of us who are the working poor and can make $30.00 pay for lunchs for an entire week while eating better than the sod's who blow $30.00 a lunch.. I'm not gonna risk it.... not until I see they are actually alive.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In a word: Advertising.
Most magazine subscriptions costs just barely, if at all, cover the mailing costs. With an online magazine like this one, fixed costs are a little different, but I am sure they are still planning to rely on advertising to plug the money gap.
Hell, I have a couple "newstand" magazines which the publishers send to me for free to get the ads in front of me, since I fit a valued advertising demographic for them. Think about PCWeek and stuff (are they still around?) I used to get a mailbox full of free computer trade rags each week pro-bono.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
I am an active Perl developer, have been for several years. All the information I need is available on-line: PerlMonks, newsgroups, etc. I have never run across a question I've had that hasn't been asked by someone else, in one form or another.
So give me one good reason why I would choose to spend my hard-earned dollars on a resource that is (1) dated as soon as the PDF hits the mailbox and (2) replicated by on-line resources?
To support the Perl movement, you say? I do that already by teaching others about Perl. That is my contribution to the world of Perl: My time in exchange for evangelization, certainly a cause Larry Wall would find acceptable.
I'm sorry, but in this day and age where information is abundantly available on the 'net, I see journal publication (dead-tree or on-line) as a poor, not-profitable business model. The idea that profit can be made from information is becoming obsolete, especially in the IT world (unless you have control over proprietary information, like Sun or Microsoft).
BTW, I'm using the term "profit" loosely here, to simply mean money available from revenues that can be put back into the business. Nothing in this post is meant to reflect upon the business motives of any of the TPJ organizers.
Please don't turn Slashdot into a begging site. Next thing you know we'll be Saving Karyn here...
It will never die, if it is still in your heart.
:-)
Kewl. Embedded Perl.
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
Who needs the New York Times when there's www.newyorktimes.com? Who needs USA Today when there's, you guessed it, www.usatoday.com?
Yes, magazines have probably been but throught market/financial HELL since the web came out, because you can't beat the speed of internet publications as opposed to a paper magazine which usually has a 3 month 'delay'.
You usually get a much higher quality of writing in a traditional magazine, not to mention you can't take a web site from the shitter, to the couch, out on the porch, on the bus, on the shitter at work, in the drive through at mcdonalds....
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
PAGERANK++ Robsell.com
How does this jibe with the claim that "TPJ is totally reader supported?" I don't read the mag, so I don't know if it has advertising, but they either don't, or they are lying when they say they are totally reader supported.
The FUD level of your troll becomes a pro-Perl6 statment.
A fistful of href's do not a discernable argument make.
All the more in the light of the extensive lengths the Perl illuminati have gone to for the purpose of ensuring a clean design.
I for one can't wait to see what sort of breakthroughs Perl6 and Parrat will beget.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Maybe the advertisers are forced to read it.
So technically, it IS reader-supported.
Is Slashdot the place for this kind of solicitation? Sure it seems like a great place to find technical people, but isn't that what ads are for? I really don't see how the health of some technical publication is really news for nerds or even stuff that matters.
I just put in my subscription, and had no trouble with the website in Mozilla. I'm set to enable first-person cookies, and have both Java and Flash; any of those could make a difference.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
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.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
I'm thinking you didn't pursue your money very far then. The original subscriptions were honored by the transition to TPJ as a section of SysAdmin. Quite honestly, the transition sucked for a number of reasons, and that's why the partnership ended up failing. But the original subscriptions were honored for anyone Jon could track down (which basically means anyone who bothered to email him asking what the deal was).
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The rate that a magazine can charge for advertising is directly dependent on the number of subscribers they have - more subscribers, higher ad rates. Probably with under 1000 subscribers they can't charge a high enough ad rate to sustain themselves.
This is why you see airline frequent flier miles can be used for magazine subscriptions. The magazines really want to give away subscriptions to get that subscriber number up, but advertisers insist that the subscribers be 'qualified subscribers' - which is anyone who pays for a subscription, or anyone who meets some other semi-arbitrary standard - like 'a frequent flier with 1000 miles to blow', 'a member of XYZ professional association', etc.
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?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I just signed up for TPJ pdf subscription, even though I got burned on the magazine subscription.
I was a subscriber to the TPJ mag since issue #3, and had just sent in my payment for three more years when I received a notice that they were discontinuing The Perl Journal and would begin sending me Sys Admin mag instead to finish out my subscription.
Received one Sys Admin mag in the mail, then nothing...What a deal.
So, I must be a glutton for punishment to send them MORE money, but I really enjoyed TPJ's content and was usually able to apply something from each issue to my daily work.
Twelve bucks a year is a pretty good investment for quality content that TPJ has provided in the past.
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
They killed BYTE magazine and ran off with the subscription monies.
I'm not surprised they are having trouble now.
And I'm not moved in the least.
Sorry for the journalists, but your company stinks.
Come on, Perl Journal, it is time to go away.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
My understanding of what happened is that originally Jon was doing TPJ out of the back of his appartment. The quality was superb, both in articles and subscriber service. Then he transferred the subscriber services to Earthweb and retained editorial control. Subscriptions were supposed to be Earthweb's business, they were supposed to know what they were doing. The content continued to be superb, but the subscriber service was bad. Then Earthweb tanked, and after a long hiatus, Jon was able to get SysAdmin (CMP) to include TPJ as a supplement (once) and then they turned it into a section. I may have lost some subscription money in there, but I already subscribed to SysAdmin, so I'm satisfied to the extent I never missed an issue. The content was thin, but I attribute that to the monthly instead of quarterly issues. So my experience can be summarized as: when Jon Orwant is doing it, it rocks. When someone else does it (i.e., for money, not love), it sucks.
So the obvious question for me is: what role is Jon Orwant playing in the current incarnation?
Yes, you can find volumes of Perl help online. There's still something to be said for well written and well edited articles by credentialed authors. If you haven't read the Perl Journal before, have a look at the archives before you shrug and move on. You may find that the magazine is worth it after all.
I agree!
Neither is Slashdot...so your point is? :-)
And to think that it was once up to nearly $300 per share. Who could've imagined it being below $1...wait, no earnings == no value == crappy stock price == delisting == bankrupt == gone!
:-)
Sure hope Slashdot doesn't have to stoop to the level of TPJ...though I'd buy a subscription to keep slashdot.org going if it came to that. Gotta have my slashdot fix
In regards to TPJ...they should emphasize community as the significant benefit of membership, since information ain't gonna do it when there's lots of free perl information all around.
Perl is here to stay. Many websites, etc are locked into Perl well into the foreseeable future. It's much like COBOL - many people said it would be long since replaced by other languages...but guess what...COBOL is still around and ain't going away anytime soon...same is true with Perl...I bet that in 2037 I'll be rewriting perl programs in preparation for Jan-18-2038 when time since epoch exceeds 31 bits.
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.
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.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
No, they are saying they need 3000 paying subscribers to make things work. Ad rates are based on subscriptions. Giving them 36K wouldn't help, that's not the point.
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Are you a single parent? If not, (why) isn't the wife/husband working as well?
From my point of view, I think you had a few too many dependants. I'm working right now such that I save 50% of what I earn to support myself when I go through university (the equivalent of 1 dependant). More than that would require a pay increase. If I had the pay increase you describe as being "a non-living wage," I could support 3 people -- assuming we all lived in Canada wher I live now.
Your situation is different because you are living in a very expensive area. Perhaps you need to find alternate work in another part of the country where inflation is not so rampant, or find an employer which is willing to match your monetary needs. There is so much you can do to improve your situation.
And don't say that reclocating is too damaging to children, because I've been to 27 non-post-secondary instutions in my life. Children will adapt to one move, especially if their home life will stabilize because of it.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I used "parent" rather than "mother" up there for a reason. Don't go trying to slam me for advocating the oppression of women, or whatever phrase for the sentiment happens to spring to your mind. I know several families where the father is the stay-at-home parent. It works just fine.
I don't know why you put "non-living wage" in quotes, because I didn't use those words. I said "poverty line", and I used the figure from the US government for the year 2000. It's applied nationwide, as little sense as that may make. So it doesn't matter if you're living in Los Altos Hills, California or Podunk, Iowa, the government considers you to be in poverty if your annual household income is less than $13,861.
Finally: You're an ass. Just who the hell are you to tell me how many kids I should be having? Or where I should be living? Or how I should direct my career? Or what should and should not be important to me? Grow up a little more, get some life experience, get your degree, take on some actual responsibility for one or two other human beings, and then, just maybe, you'll be qualified to tell someone else how they should be going about it. Even then it's damned rude.
And the brethren went away edified.
I'm glad you're choosing parenting over purchasing your children. Doing more with less is something a lot of young people just don't understand; hopefully your young people will understand it.
:)
As for a Hyundai being a hardship... where does that come from? Of course you should live within your means. Maybe you've gone through some financial equivalent of velocitization living in silicon valley -- I don't look down on someone because they drive a practical vehicle (or a non-BMW). It's logical, after all! Needs and wants always have to be balanced. It's called living within one's means
By your (US Federal) standards, I've only not been in poverty for about 6 months of my life, and am just now climbing back out from a pit in which I lived at half that amount (not the most fun, I must say).
And as for your last paragraph: wake up. You were complaining about a situation which you can change through direct action on your part. I can see informing people about a social issue, or explaining a position, but whining about something you can change is a waste of your time and mine. If you can change it, you shouldn't be wasting your breath talking about how it's not changing on its own. Right? If you aren't happy in your situation, change it!
Your entire post seems to make a bunch of assumptions about how I'm looking down on you because you're not a trillionaire, even if it's tangental to my reply.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Hinting at things, even strongly hinting at things, will never beat actually coming out and saying something. Especially online! Emoticons change the meaning of a sentence entirely! :)
:)
"From my point of view, I think you had a few too many dependants." if you ignore the have/had problem (oops), seems straightforward to me. "From my point of view" as in "as I see it" as in how I would react in that situation. If I'd said, "I think you need to do this entirely different, CaptainCarrot" then I would be (presumably) telling you how to live you life. But maybe you always take suggestions as presumptions, because that's how you are. Another thing I can't tell online because I can't see your body posture.
In your reply, you seemed to be speaking from a bad position, saying that life was nothing but strife and pain (IE: "it's not easy going" and such repeated a few times). Based on that, I assumed you were having problems, and suggested a solution. After all, if there's no problem, why bring it up like that?
I'll chock it up to human nature. Everyone tends to exagerate, especially online. If you say you're not having problems, I have no other way (nor inclination) to verify it. I think I'll take your word for it
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.