Thanks for your suggestion. I like perlbrew, and I may end up using that, but for now I've chosen a simpler method to get things going. I have set up local::lib on my account, then used the excellent cpanm to install the two modules that I need so far (Mojolicious::Lite and CAM::PDF).

The biggest hurdle I've had is to remember the chmod +x $your_script_here command. And I'm using sshfs so that I can edit locally, in the comfort of gvim, rather than fiddling with text mode vim which is doable but a bit ancient. (I love me some syntax highlighting.)

Thanks everyone for your feedback!

Update: Rob Hammond's blog post about running Mojo on a shared host was quite useful -- I feel a bit of a fraud when I put Apache on my resume when it actually means I need to run off to http://apache.org to go look something simple up. That's what happens when you only need to tweak something every year or two.