I always said the major advantage Perl has over all the other scripting languages out there is CPAN. Once you're familiar with Perl there's pretty much nothing you can't do by assembling modules from CPAN. I know this. But the fact is, Perl ships with some pretty impressive libraries.

Today I bit the bullet, went thru the documentation and found I didn't even need CPAN to handle my Latin 1 to UTF-8 character set conversion. It was easier than setting up a blog to do it, that's for sure.

With this conversion script I should have no problem with international characters and such. I already have a PHP script to clean up the experimental embedded CSS in my old entries. Tomorrow I'll finish up the scripts that will rewrite the image tags. The internal links are problematic. I need to count them to see how big a problem it is.

I've also gone semi-mainstream in that, since Drupal is planning a new release soon, I decided not to go with the forked version. The next version has some fairly significant changes, one of which broke my full-text search module. I know what the problem is though. Fixing it will be a matter of reading some stuff and typing some stuff.

I got the cutting edge version and joined the developer mailing list, which is interesting because I've never watched a well-established open source project from the inside.

Anyway, it looks like the "how" part of my project will be fine. Time to flesh out the "what" part.