As foretold by the previous post on this blog, Plerd is now available on CPAN. Starting now, you should (in theory) be able to install the latest Plerd release on your machine by running a command like cpan Plerd, and from there making a new Plerd-based blog appear with plerdall --init.

Thanks to all who tested and provided feedback on Plerd’s experimental GitHub branch last month for helping to make this possible. I expect that plenty of rough bits still remain to file down with this release, and I will attend to these as I find them — or as they are pointed out to me.

The software’s presence on MetaCPAN does not particularly impress, at the moment. In particular, where one would expect to find full documentation for using Plerd, one instead gets a sheepish hyperlink to Plerd’s README file on GitHub, followed by a not immediately useful guide to Plerd’s software internals — and even that isn’t very well formatted! But, I knew I had to start somewhere, so I decided to just ship the darn thing and start improving all that stuff in-place. I know better than to discount the motivational power of a project looking a bit awful in broad daylight, after all.

Documentation, in particular, sits at the top of my list of Plerd sub-projects to tackle next. While I will always strive to keep the project’s simplest use-case actually simple, Plerd’s complete user manual has nonetheless long since outgrown that single README file. Plerd has come a long way in the nearly four years since its initial launch; this version, intended for the first time to run outside of a manually Git-cloned directory, feels like a first awkward lurch out of childhood. I look forward to a confusing and exciting adolescence for this project.