My Other Blog Is A WordPress

Sun, 28 Aug 2005 23:56:52 GMT

After provoking a small debate with my WordPress, PHP, Anti-Intuitive Reality, ... post yesterday, I feel obligated to at least try out WordPress.

And as a result, I have two blogs now. My canonical blog is still the Pebble powered (and dully named) Weiqi Gao's Weblog. My new blog, named 不惑, is available at http://www.weiqigao.com/blog2/.

The initial mission of the new blog is to get me familiarized with WordPress and PHP so that I can say something more intelligent on this subject. Once that is done, I'll use it to explore some other topics.

My first impression so far:

The initial setup of WordPress is comparable to that of Pebble.
The WordPress blog feels snappier than Pebble, although both are more than adquate.
WordPress takes noticably longer to save blog entries than Pebble does.
Both seems to support the same set of basic features.
WordPress's blog editor text area is more developed (more Quicktags) than Pebble's.
WordPress relies on PHP, which is available in the default installation of Fedora Core 3. Pebble relies on Java and Tomcat, which are not available by default.

The bottom line, as I see it, is this: If I want to setup a blog and I'm not a PHP programmer, I can still setup WordPress. If I want to setup a blog and I'm not a Java programmer, there is not way that I can setup Pebble.

I agree with David Herron on his accessment of the reason for the lack of Java hosting services.

Eric Burke's argument that Java hosting requires more memory can explain why Java hosting is more expensive. If the same amount of memory can host either 100 PHP accounts or 33 Java accounts, then it make sense to price the Java accounts at 3 times the price of PHP accounts. But it cannot explain why there is less Java hosting than PHP hosting services.

The complexities of Java web applications doesn't seem to matter in this argument. As a user, I just don't see them.

Update: My experiment ended in 199 days. The blog is off line now. The following are comments posted to the blog entry in the WordPress system:

Eric Burke Says:
August 28th, 2005 at 9:08 pm

Wordpress posting may take longer if you include hyperlinks in your posts and pingback is enabled. Wordpress might be trying to ping each of those outbound hyperlinks to let them know you are blogging about them.

Pebble and Wordpress use different data storage techniques. Pebble stores pages in flat files, Wordpress uses MySql. This could impact performance when rendering pages.

Anders Says:
August 29th, 2005 at 2:10 am

The long save times are probably because the xml pings it sends while saving.

Ed Finkler Says:
August 29th, 2005 at 9:25 am

Just FYI, most of the apparent delay in saving posts in Wordpress comes from the automatic pinging via XML-RPC of external sites to notify them of updates. The post is actually saved and available on your site immediately. You can disable the pinging by clearing out Options > Writing > Update Services.

Harry Fuecks Says:
August 29th, 2005 at 4:10 pm

It’s ironic that the PHP applications that are most popular (Wordpress and phpBB in particular) are also those that raise the eyebrows of those that know PHP well, usually for secuirty reasons. You may want to read these for example;

http://blog.php-security.org/archives/4-WordPress-a-hackers-paradise.html
http://blog.php-security.org/archives/7-WordPress-update.html
http://blog.php-security.org/archives/8-WordPress-irresponsible-silent-tarball-update.html

Stephan Esser, the author, is a developer for the Hardened PHP project http://www.hardened-php.net/

One alternative is s9y: http://www.s9y.org/ - used by many how also do stuff with PHP internals. s9y hasn’t quite got character sets nailed down yet but if you hack your “local config” you can force it to use UTF-8 without breaking anything (if you’re using the English localization).

Another I’ve heard good things about but never tried is http://www.dotclear.net/ - the language barrier is probably hampering dotclear’s popularity

A third way might be Drupal but that’s not specifically a blog.

Forum-wise, while I’m on this rant, this is what everyone should be using: http://fudforum.org/forum/. Sadly doesn’t quite look as slick as phpBB, which is probably the #1 criterion for many. And perhaps the single file installer throws people (clever trick embedding a binary tarball inside a PHP script) but the code is sane - things like profiling will have happened, for example, and the secuirty track record is good. Here’s one of the authors pointing a sly finger at phpBB http://ilia.ws/archives/55-Webhosts-have-had-enough!.html

不惑? Says:
August 29th, 2005 at 5:26 pm

Interesting title! It means “Forty years old”, courtesy of Google Translate:)

Zhicheng

不惑 » Blog Archive » What The Five Munites Setup Doesn’t Do Says:
September 3rd, 2005 at 8:45 am

[…] 不惑 The Other Side Of Me (I’m Weiqi Gao) « My Other Blog Is A WordPress […]

WordPress, PHP, Anti-Intuitive Reality, ...

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 13:39:01 GMT

Had an interesting conversation at the stuff meeting this past last Wednesday, i.e., 3 days ago:

Me: Hi, I started to read your blog.

Nathan: I've noticed. I did spend some time tweaking it. It was fun.

Me: It's quite polished.

Brad: Who's hosting it?

Nathan: I'm hosting it myself.

Brad: What software do you use?

Nathan: WordPress.

Me: Isn't that written in PHP?

Nathan: Yes. And it's quite an easy language.

Me: Didn't they put PHP code right there in the HTML pages?

Nathan: They do.

Me: Didn't we say that's bad?

Nathan: Apparently they are doing alright. Lots of people are using WordPress.

Me: And look at us. We tried so hard to separate our stuff into layers and all that and still can't manage the complexity. We have so many frameworks yet not anything as popular as WordPress.

Nathan: Not everyone needs the scalability. How many hits can I get?

Brad: You are hosting your blog in Java, right.

Me: Yes. I use Pebble with Tomcat. I like it a lot. A well designed tag library is a joy to use.

But why is this? Why do people (at least some people) flock to something like PHP, which we Java people know is "bad" (or at least were told is bad)?

Could it be because that Java, although good, is too hard?

Could it be because Java is not available out of the box? (If you want to do ASP.NET, you get a Windows server. If you want to do PHP, you get a Linux server. If you want to do Java, you get a what?)

Could it be because the Java implementations on different platforms are incompatible? (What's the latest version of Java on Mac OS X? on Solaris 7? 8? 9? 10? on Free BSD? On AIX? HP-UX? Tru64)

Could it be because the Java stuff is too hard to set up right for end-users? True that I can setup Pebble in five minutes, but that's assuming I have a working Tomcat environment. And that is in itself a non-trivial task.

Could it be because what we have been told this past ten years were wrong. That PHP is really superior to Java?

Could it be because contrary to what we believed and what we've been told by our bosses, we aren't that bright, and couldn't see something that is so plain to the PHP product vendors and users. Doesn't that Joel on Software guy have a product that's ASP on Windows and PHP on UNIX? I wonder why he did not use Java?

Fooled us, those @#$%s!

Weiqi Gao's Observations - php tag

My Other Blog Is A WordPress

WordPress, PHP, Anti-Intuitive Reality, ...