Iron Man Blogging Challenge

In order to promote the Perl language, and encourage more people within the Perl community to promote the language to the world outside the Perl echo-chamber, Enlightened Perl is pleased to announce the Iron Man Perl Blogging Challenge.

The rules are very simple: you blog, about Perl. Any aspect of Perl you like. Long, short, funny, serious, advanced, basic: it doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be in English, either, if that's not your native language. To stay in the Iron Man Challenge, you must maintain a rolling frequency of 4 posts every 32 days, with no more than 10 days between posts.

Your blogs will be aggregated on the Iron Man Planet at http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/.

Everybody starts off as Paper Man (or Woman). Manage four posts, week on week, and you get to be Stone Man. Get further and you get to be Bronze Man. Six months of straight posting qualifies you as Iron Man. And don't worry if you fail - there's no losing this competition, you just go back to Paper Man (and there'll be a consolation prize while you work your way back up). For each level there will be a corresponding badge for your blog.

There will be a post of the month competition: a committee of good Perl writers and bloggers, who will look over the posts and pick one out to be honoured each month. The winner will get a limited edition T-shirt, and possibly other prizes from sponsors.

Better still, the post of the month committee members are all going to be available to critique your posts, if you want them to. These people all know how hard it is to write well and they're all willing to try and help you write better if you're interested.

On top of that, there's an extra incentive: Enlightened Perl board member Matt Trout, whose idea this was, will be be blogging as well. Obviously as the organizer, he's not eligible for a prize, but...

If he misses a post once anyone has got to Iron Man, the people who have got there get to choose a talk title and a colour. And Matt will submit a talk of that title to YAPC::EU and YAPC::NA the next time there's a CFP, and he will give that talk with his hair dyed the colour that's been chosen. (If he can't find hair dye of that colour that's semi-permanent, he gets the option to spend the entire conference wearing clothes of that colour instead.)

So... get blogging!

Mail ironman@shadowcat.co.uk with your blog details. Start posting now.