Tuesday morning, I took whatthefuck.com down for an hour and moved everything to the new 4.0 release of the site. You cannot undersatnd how happy this makes me, it's been something I've been wanting and trying to do for about four years now.
The original www.whatthefuck.com is a series of CGI scripts strung together in a semi-cohesive mess of perl with inline HTML. The main update that the old system got was moving from cascading flat files to MySQL, and it was barely relational. The new web site is the culmination of many things I've learned since October of 1999. Some of it is a bit rushed, and I get to go in and clean up now, but it works, and the few failures I've seen have been quickly patched. I need to go through some security checks still, but things are "looking good".
The new site is still written in Perl, but utilizes the Catalyst MVC Web Application Framework. I've switched to PostgreSQL for the database, and DBIx::Class as the perl interface to it. The front end templates are all rendered using the Template Toolkit classes, and for those of you writing Perl web scripts without it, you're seriously missing out. This combination allows me the combined luxuries of using CPAN with a solid rapid application development framework, and I couldn't be happier.
More later, perhaps.
