Everyone here has made excellent points. I have a couple of suggestions to add.

1. Learn PHP. It's enough like perl you should feel comfortable with it pretty quickly, and despite perl's obvious superiority, PHP has it's usefulness.
2. Learn ASP. I despise VBScript, but you can use Javascript with ASP without installing anything special (it's a standard option with ASP). Also, ASP (pre-.NET) is really just an set of COM objects which you script together, so its amazingly simple to learn and use.

In the end I would not listen to any article which claims that A is "in fast retreat" and B is "simple the best choice". Almost certainly the author has a limited (if at all) understanding of A, and is in love with B. Pmachine for instance is a PHP product, so clearly they are going to sing the praises of PHP, otherwise they would look kinda stupid :)

As for the "loosing a big project to an ASP shop", I think this should tell you that you need to expand your skillset. The customer is always right (even when they are wrong). I once worked on a project where the customer dictated we use BEA WebLogic J2EE server with an Oracle database on Solaris to build their site with. The site consisted of several static pages (400+) a message board, and a registration page. (A classic example of using an Elephant gun to kill a flea) We could have done the whole thing with Perl/PHP, MySQL and Apache on Linux and saved them thousands of dollars in lisence fees, but they would hear none of it.

I'll keep telling myself that Perl is for *real* web programmers, and everyone else is just jealous.

Bah! Real web programmers use Postscript ;-)