I searched the net and of course CPAN for a blogging engine based on Perl. The only one I came up with was Angerwhale. I read through the CPAN pods and looked at blog.jrock.us to see it in action. It seemed pretty nice and I decided to give it a try.

I read the README file, ran “perl Makefile.PL” and “make test” as I was supposed to do. There were some unmet dependencies, of course. Many of them failed to install unfortunately. After spending a lot of time installing all of them manually (most of them needed additional development packages from debian) I was almost there.

Three to go: Catalyst::View::Jemplate. That damn thing wouldn’t install because most of the tests failed. As it turned out it was the fault of the latest Jemplate upgrade which made some changes to its API. A dev release of Jemplate fixed that problem, but that’s not the way it is supposed to work.

Two to go: Test::WWW::Mechanize. Tests failed. Both on my system and most of the CPAN testers’. Seems like a libwww release breaks these tests.

One more to go: Kate. This is a syntax highlighting engine. Angerwhale uses it to format and color code passages. It failed to install as well. There is a fix for that problem but this patch is 4 month old! Why didn’t the maintainer apply that patch and push a new release to cpan?

At that point I was pretty sick and tired of trying to force install or patch any more modules.

After rethinking this whole blog thing I visited wordpress.com.

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
unp latest.tar.gz
lynx http://localhost/wordpress

Well, and after entering db user / password etc. I had my blog up and running.

There might have been some coincidences and bad timing but after all I must say that installing wordpress took me about 5min. Not installing Angerwhale took me more than an hour.

Wordpress does a great job and it just works. It’s just sad that there is no such success story with a perl written blog engine.