* for the record, my steampunk goggles were bought off of Etsy.

He started with WordPress, and was asked to try out Moveable Type too. Now he’s set up Moveable Type, WordPress, S9Y, and Textpattern.

I’m interested in his opinion because I’m weighing moving this weblog to one of those systems, or moving everything to Live Journal where I have a permanent account.

But anyone can walk up, hand $10 to a hosting company, and start serving PHP + MySQL applications. If you want to run Perl, Python, Ruby or anything else, you need to use CGI or a dedicated and more expensive server.

Not to knock those other languages (and I’d like to do some projects in Ruby or Python,) but until Mod_(Perl|Python|Ruby) becomes as common as PHP in hosting packages, people are going to build their applications using PHP.

Why: because the more posts you have, the more work there is to update all the static files in reaction to a change (new post, edit post, trackback, comment.) More weblogs on the server, more events, more inefficient CGI processeses. I know of people reporting that it takes them several minutes to rebuild their sites.

I think this an unanticipated consequence of Moveable Type’s success: there are plenty of shared servers running Apache under virtual hosting with hundreds of instances of Moveable Type’s cgi-bin scripts running at any moment.

Moveable Type’s innovation over Blogger was to keep the idea of the static rendering of your weblog, but move the generation to your server so that a failure at blogger.com did not disrupt all the weblog writers on the network.

Generating pages, only when they change is a good idea, but this sort of caching can waste resources. Consider the case of a busy, comment-rich post. Posting a comment requires regenerating as many as four pages: the blog front page, the page with the post, the by-date archive page containing the post, and the page for each category to which the entry belongs.

Traffic to the comment thread, however, is most likely driven by other sites linking to the post, so a heavily commented post should focus caching on the post, not the other files.

You need finer levels of caching and invalidation in Moveable Type, and ways for multiple sites to share resources. My guess is that is what’s going on in Typepad.

Also, because I could and because it was fun. I have used it succesfully for a fairly large project at work involving translating XML from one form to another.

Um, he does know there’s already a perfectly fine functional language for transforming XML?

[ From things that piss Shonagon off ] When someone gets ill and you call the exorcist – and then he’s out, and you have to get your messengers to go looking for him. And then you wait for ages, and he finally shows up and you ask him to start praying, but he’s completely knackered and by the time he actually starts praying he’s half-asleep. Pain in the ass.

He built it in Bryar, his CPAN module for weblogs which uses Template Toolkit for rendering.

From that list, mod_murka looks neat. It looks for a cached HTML version of the request URI, and if it’s not found, looks for the .xml file, transforms it using whatever stylesheet’s mentioned in the file’s processing instruction, and caches the result.

He’s using Relax NG as the schema language because a Relax document is an XML document, and Relax, unlike XML Schema (XSD), is ‘human readable’.