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                          Random blathering on blogs

One of the things I noticed [1] about Grey Matter [2] was it's slowness, and
while part of that may be due to Perl, it might also have to do with the
number of pages [3] it has to rebuild, according to Karl Martino of of
Paradox1x. [4]

Now, mod_blog also recreates some files whenever a new entry is made, but
it's not quite as bad as Grey Matter or Moveable Type from what I understand.
Three files are created—the first is the main page and that is for speed
reasons, as that page is most likely to be loaded. It doesn't have to be made
it could be generated dynamically when requested (in fact, that's how I was
doing it originally). The second file is the RSS (Rich Site Summary) [5]
file, and while it too could be generated dynamically, again for speed
reasons I build a pre-cached version if you will. The third file is a recent
addition and it's the Mozilla/Netscape Sidebar page [6] and again, like the
other two, could be generated dynamically, but for speed reasons …

Now the posting speed is another issue. Having used the Grey Matter
interface, yes, that is a bit slow to respond since there is a lot of file
building going on. Radio [7] appears to respond faster, but that's because it
spawns a background task to do the file rebuilding; it doesn't pause the
interface until it's done. mod_blog, on the other hand, is different. The
email interface responds quickly, since the email client will batch it up for
sending, then the server will batch it up for sending and finally it'll
arrive and be processed, so via email, the process seems instantaneous,
although it may take a minute or two for everything to be processed.

The web interface is fast—less than a minute and that includes the three
files being created, plus sending notification to Weblogs.com [8] and sending
the email notification (granted, there are only a few people signed up for
that right now, but if it becomes an issue I can spawn a background task to
send the email).

This on a 33 MHz (megaHertz) 486 (and yes, the software is in C but what
processing is done, it might be a tad slower in Perl—not entirely sure).

Archiving—that's a non-issue with mod_blog. The whole site here is dynamic
(well, except for three pre-generated pages) and the concept of building
archive pages just doesn't apply. Granted, I have control over the server so
I can do that, but not everyone has such access. Different tools for
different needs.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2002/03/20.3
[2] http://www.noahgrey.com/greysoft/
[3] http://www.paradox1x.org/mt/archives/2002_03_25.shtml#000336
[4] http://www.paradox1x.org/
[5] https://boston.conman.org/bostondiaries.rss
[6] javascript:addSidebarPanel()
[7] http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/2002/03/25.html
[8] http://www.weblogs.com/

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