I started thinking about the redesign tonight, and Mason is clearly more than I need.

I still want to use mod_perl, but don't want a whole mess of perl scripts to drive the website. So instead of going with either end of the spectrum, I've started writing my own perl handler (PerlHandler option in apache). It's dead simple and will let me do things I need to do with apache and also allow me to have most of the site driven with XML and XSLT in some very cool ways.

More news on this as it develops.

After browsing through the online Mason book (which is free!) I set to work on converting this site from PHP. Oh man is it simple. Doing things in perl is often much simpler than a similar solution in PHP, so this makes me happy.