After six years away from it—long story—I have resumed active work on Plerd. A week ago I released Plerd 1.900, and I have released several bug-fix patches since then. As of this writing, the most recent release is 1.903. For instructions on installing Plerd, see its README.

The major new feature introduced with 1.900 is incremental publishing. Instead of republishing every page on your entire blog every time you make or update a post, Plerd now republishes only the pages that must update to reflect the change that you made. This results in faster publication times, especially noticeable on larger blogs.

As promised in the previous post on this blog, version 1.900 promotes webmention sending to a core feature, while removing the experimental webmention receipt feature. If you were using that feature and wish to receive and store webmentions using Whim—my own self-contained webmention processor—then you can use a Plerd-to-Whim migration script that I link to in that post.

I have updated the documentation in the project’s long README file, which had franky grown rather stale even before my time away from the project. Finally, I took the opportunity to fix many bugs in Plerd that people had reported over the years. I genuinely appreciate everyone’s reports—and their patience.

All this work is a run-up to the next major version of Plerd, which I’m likely to call 2.0, since it will introduce some breaking changes. These include a higher minimum-required version of Perl, and a new Markdown processor which supports more contemporary syntax—with the side effect of producing slightly different output in certain circumstances. I intend to keep version 1.X available as a maintenance branch on GitHub, while the release available through CPAN will continue to offer the most recent version of Plerd.

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