This morning there was a cb discussion about Not Matt's Scripts, the scripts section on cpan and of course Matts scripts.

An important question was: Why are Matts scripts so popular and widely used?
And the answer seems to be:
The intended audience for those scripts have nothing or little to do with Perl or programming. They want something out of the box they can run with as little modification as possible.
When they search for such a thing, they might not know about Perl at all - they search for form and email and they get Matt (at least I did some years ago, when I didn't know anything about Perl).

So now we know, what the audience wants - How do we inform them of other available scripts?
The problem with that is:

• The audience is not aware of CPAN and / or any other Perl-sites.

So we have to find a way to promote cpan scripts that is actually echoed in http://google.com and others.

My first suggestion was: place a link on your perlmongers site. But actually it is more useful to make a page dedicated to scripts, that has all the keywords (cgi,form,mail,guestbook,...) in it, describes some of the cpan scripts and feed that to http://google.com. Another way of getting something containing the link to cpan scripts in google would be writing hints in your local Perl/cgi - forum. Do that only in appropriate places, when hints are welcome.

Can you think of other ways to promote cpan scripts or Not Matt's Scripts?

neophyte Niederrhein.pm

update: I should say, I use the node name Not Matt's Scripts just as node name here out of sheer lazyness.
I suggest naming it Web Scripts Suite or something alike.

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