I’d thought that after my “Evangelizing” entry, I’d finished raving about all of the reasons why I switched to WordPress for my blogging software. But gEye and Xrlq have asked for more details, and I imagine a few others want to know, too.

The answer is simple: I switched to WP because I’m a brilliant woman with impeccable taste. What? That’s not good enough of an answer for you? Fine, then prepare for some serious “geek talk.”

1. I like speed. From the admin perspective, WP is blindingly fast. Where I once had to wait several minutes per entry while MT rebuilt the index and pinged different sites, I now enjoy instantaneous posting. With WP, when I hit “Publish” it’s there… er, here.

2. You like speed. Unlike MT which is Perl-based, WP uses PHP which delivers content far more efficiently. Both Perl and PHP use Apache, but Perl isn’t integrated in Apache like PHP is and instead relies on cgi. That means, each time Apache runs into a Perl-script it has to start a new process to run Perl, then the process heads back to Apache for the content before Apache sends it to the browser.

Clear as mud, right? Well, think of it as standing in your living room and wanting to go to the kitchen but having to go out the front door and walk around your house to the back door before going to get a drink of water. You accomplish your goal, but not very efficiently.

I’m not trying to knock Perl, because it’s a very powerful language, but it’s inefficient for higher traffic blog sites, unlike PHP which is an integrated Apache controller. (More readers = more calls to Apache = more processes that have to be started = more overhead.) PHP doesn’t require Apache to launch a new process, and the result is faster delivery of content from the database to the browser… like walking straight from your living room sofa to the kitchen sink.

Curious how fast? Check out the bottom of this page. You’ll see a number next to the WP link, representing the seconds it took for my page to load. When I checked just now, it fully loaded in a fresh non-cached window in less than a second.

3. Validation is good for the soul. I’m not talking about the touchy-feeling kind. I mean W3 validation. WP has it. MT does not. Don’t believe me? Try validating your MT page.

Why is it important? Because clean, valid HTML code means being multi-browser compatible. It also speeds up load time (remember, we like speed) and optimizes your inclusion in search engines. In fact, valid code can be the difference between #1 and #110 in Google ranking. But, hey, if you don’t like traffic to your site that doesn’t matter, right?

4. Sometimes being easy is a good thing. Installing or upgrading MT is a hassle. Certain files have to go in the cgi-bin while others have to go to one of two sub-folders in a static folder and, as if that wasn’t enough to remember, some have to be uploaded in binary while others use ASCII. Then you have to create a separate folder for your archives and sacrifice a small animal while dancing naked under the light of a blue moon and… you get the point. Upgrading is pretty much the same process.

With WP, you upload the contents of the unzipped folder to your root directory then run the installation script. Period. It takes 5 minutes or less. And upgrading? Yep, there’s a script for that, too, and it takes less than 2 minutes. Nice, eh?

5. Freedom is good. Since MT’s installation and upgrading process is such a hassle, lots of folks need help with it. Six Apart will do it for a $40 fee, but no one else is allowed to charge unless they buy a $150 commercial license allowing installation of one copy for one user. Want a blog hosting company that offers pre-installed MT? Fuggeda ’bout it unless you’re interested in Six Apart’s hosted blogging software, TypePad, which runs on the MT engine and is subject to the same limitations.

WP has no such restrictions and, in fact, many hosts with Fantastico enabled in their cPanel offer WP installation scripts.

Finally…

6. Anything you can do, I can do better. Well, maybe not you, but WP users have a slew of easily installed hacks and plug-ins that give them the same bells and whistles of MT blogs without sacrificing speed. New ones are created all the time and, again, installation is as simple as uploading to the WP directory and pasting a snippet of code.

So, there you have it. You should’ve just settled for the short explanation about me being a brilliant woman with impeccable taste.

UPDATE: As several folks have pointed out, mod_Perl means Apache no longer has to launch new processes when encountering a script. My experience still convinces me that WP is still infinitely faster than my old MT installation and, as I mentioned, we like speed.

Friday, April 16th, 2004, 11:53 am   |   Blog bites, Tinkering Bites  |  RSS feed Comments and pings are currently closed.