Marcus
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7 months ago
in 10 Reasons Why I Ditched Wordpress › Yongfook | Web Producer and Usability Consultant based in Tokyo on Yongfook.com
20 queries per page is nothing. Sure it might be more than you'd think should be required but it would hardly classify it as a resource hog. Caching also has it's downside - obviously I have no idea how you've implemented it but caching on any large scale kinda system generally scales badly (I've found out the hard way!).
I think it really depends on how serious you are about blogging and what your level of technical expertise is. I'd generally recommend a hosted platform as they're getting better and better these days and they are even customisable/plugin-able to a certain extent - but then again I'm biased (disclosure: I'm lead technical architect on Webjam which is an (MVC based ;)) hosted cms/blogging/social networking platform). If you're more technically minded, then wordpress or even a custom system like you've written can probably suit you individual needs slightly better, but this certainly isn't the case for most people.
Marcus
http://www.webjam.com
http://www.chickerino.com
I think it really depends on how serious you are about blogging and what your level of technical expertise is. I'd generally recommend a hosted platform as they're getting better and better these days and they are even customisable/plugin-able to a certain extent - but then again I'm biased (disclosure: I'm lead technical architect on Webjam which is an (MVC based ;)) hosted cms/blogging/social networking platform). If you're more technically minded, then wordpress or even a custom system like you've written can probably suit you individual needs slightly better, but this certainly isn't the case for most people.
Marcus
http://www.webjam.com
http://www.chickerino.com
1 reply
Thanks for your comment. I don't want to get into some silly pissing war here, but I do feel you are making an unfair comparison. My individual blog, compared to a hosted platform that has to serve hundreds (thousands?) of different blogs each with their own audiences and traffic levels will of course have to have a massively different scalability strategy.
Anyway, I agree - caching is not the be all and end all, but it's a decent enough solution for an individual's blog like mine.
Also, when trying to make a page load more efficiently one of the areas you can look at - and it's disingenuous to deny this - is making queries snappier. This involves a lot of trial and error - for example, can I make one expensive query in the place of 5 separate queries, and is that expensive query going to hit the database more or less than doing it all separately.
My point about a page with many, many queries on it was more about the carefree attitude to plugins that Wordpress kind of encourages you to foster. Your blog could begin as a model of efficiency but as soon as you start adding all these plugins written by unknown people you open yourself up to serving a page that has many more db hits than you intended, and sometimes these can be very expensive requests (a popular addition is one of those "related posts" plugins - these in particular are really fat queries) which just add up and up to the undisciplined or uneducated blog owner and make your pages very inefficient.