This site is my own personal Perl notebook. I use it to capture bookmarks, articles, and anything else about Perl that is of interest to me. You will notice an emphasis on Net::FTP and Net::NNTP. This site also reflects my interest in manipulating XML files with Perl. Based on recent experiences, I've become very proficient in MIME::Parser and Net::POP3 as well.

The best examples of my work are under the Portfolio box over on the left side of this page.

This site is a set of static pages which have been "baked" using my own homebrew content management system (CMS), called gpp (stands for "Gerard's Perl Page"). For a discussion of "baking" static web content, see Aaron Swartz's article Bake, Don't Fry, and its sequel Building Baked Sites.

The news articles on this site are formatted in my own custom XML format. The articles are parsed by libxml-perl and inserted into custom page templates which are then processed by the Template Toolkit. The RDF site summary for this site is generated with XML::RSS in v0.91 format.

You can syndicate article headlines and descriptions from this site. The RDF Site Summary file for this site is http://home.san.rr.com/lanois/perl/site.xml.

I use Perl more for fun, than profit.

My first exposure to Perl was back in around 1994 or so when I needed to convert a user manual from FrameMaker into plain text. I discovered a program called MifMucker (pronounce that carefully), which was written in Perl.

For the next few years I occasionally wrote some simplistic data reformatting programs.

At my day job, I wanted to publish my email folder of all the customer support mail I had encountered, mainly so that the customer support staff could access it directly via the company intranet. I found a super nice Perl program called MHonArc that did this.

When I started maintaining a web server, I began writing a program which would mirror the site via FTP for backup purposes. That program was the basis for an article I wrote for The Perl Journal.

Back at my day job, I did quite a bit of work with controlling Windows applications with OLE Automation via Win32::OLE, especially across DCOM.

When I got interested in MP3s, I wrote my own application in Perl using Net::NNTP called ubh, The Usenet Binary Harvester to download MP3s from Usenet newsgroups.

I also helped rewrite a program called whatpix, a Perl program which finds and optionally moves or removes duplicate files.

I mostly lurk on and occasionally post to comp.lang.perl.modules. I mostly just lurk on and rarely post to comp.lang.perl.misc.

I lurk on use Perl;, where I'm known as perldoc. I maintain a journal there, but the main purpose of that journal is to send you to this web site.

I also lurk on Perl Monks, where I'm also known as perldoc.