Last weekend, we had a very successful (and very enjoyable) London Perl Workshop. After a five-year break, it was great to see so many old faces again. But in addition to people who had been regular attendees at recent workshops, two other groups of people were there in large numbers—people who had moved away from the Perl community (and who were coming back for the nostalgia) and new Perl users who hadn’t been to any Perl conference before. In both cases, it seems that one marketing move was particularly effective at telling both of these groups about the workshop.

It was a small, text advert that ran on MetaCPAN.

I had nothing to do with the organisation of the workshop, so I have no idea who had the idea of running that ad, but it was (like so many great ideas) obvious in retrospect. It’s great to publish blog posts about upcoming events and mention events in the Perl Weekly newsletter. But marketing like that is mostly going to be read by people who are already part of the Perl community. And they (hopefully) already know about the workshop.

Whereas, sites like MetaCPAN are visited by Perl programmers who don’t consider themselves part of the community. People who don’t attend Perl Mongers meetings. People who don’t read blogs.perl.org. People who are (to use terminology that has been used to explain this problem for about twenty years) outside the echo chamber.

Advertising Perl community events to as large an audience as possible is a really good idea, and I think we should do more of it. But it has its downsides. Someone has to do some work to create a pull request to add the advert (and another one to remove it once the event is over). That’s not hard, but it requires thought and planning. I started to wonder if we could simplify this process and, in doing so, encourage more people to run ads like these on sites where more people might see them.

After an hour or so, I had a prototype of the Perl Ad Server – which I have subsequently cleaned up and improved.

It’s a simple enough concept. You add a tiny fragment of Javascript to your website. And that then automatically adds a small banner ad to the top of your site. We can control the ads that are being promoted by simply editing the JSON that we serve to the client sites.

It’s experimental. So I’d like to get as many people as possible to try it out.

It comes with a tiny caveat. I’m neither a web designer nor a Javascript expert. So it may interact with some web frameworks in weird ways (I added it to CPAN Dashboard and the ad appeared under the navbar – which isn’t supposed to happen). If it doesn’t work with your site for some reason, please remove the Javascript and raise an issue so I can investigate.

And if you’d like your event added to the current list of ads, let me know too.

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