So what is PMPlanet? It's a little project that theorbtwo started in 2004. Based on XPlanet, it shows the location of the Perl Monks who are currently in Other Users, on a 3D rendering of planet Earth, with up to date cloud map, and current lighting by the sun.

It got little love since then, partly because theorbtwo tends to lose interested as soon as a project is working (and that's perfectly fine as he tends to come up with new cool projects on a regular base); partly because its resource requirements were a little high for those days, considering it ran on an old PC at his home, both in CPU time as in internet bandwidth; and partly because it requires quite a bit of maintenance to get reasonable guess for the location of monks who are unaware that PMplanet even exists: at the moment, pmplanet.pl counts over 1000 custom entered lines of code for rules for matching locations, with their longitude and latitude.

It has been years since PMplanet last ran... but a lot of Monks still fondly remembered it. As there are enough dead, formerly cool, (Perl) projects already, and that isn't good for morale in the Perl World... So we decided to revive it.

moritz has generously offered to host PMplanet on a more beefy server of his own, with a proper internet connection (and a cute domain name — unfortunately, no longer...); and I have taken over maintenance and (some) development. You may remember that I've been tinkering with PMplanet back then. I'm planning on merging at least some of those additions, back in. Plus, I have a few more new ideas...

You can now find it on its own domain, thanks to the miracle of virtual hosts, at http://pmplanet.timtowtdi.org http://pmplanet.perlgeek.de/. The map is updated once every 6 minutes, partly because we don't want to put an unnecessary strain on the Perlmonks webservers, and partly because the contents of Other Users isn't supposed to change quickly.

If you find that you are displayed in a wrong location on earth, the most reliable way to fix that on your own, is by inserting a HTML comment with your coordinates (latitude and longitude) in your home node. Instructions are on the site.

Update: due to unfortunate expiration of the domain name (and it was cute), the project has moved to yet another domain: you can now find it at http://pmplanet.perlgeek.de/.