An Experiment of a Webmaster

I’ve never actually used blog software before because I’m not a person who normally likes to talk about my personal life, and thats what I’ve always thought of blogs as for. After dipping more into the search engine optimization and content targeted advertising, I began to understand why a blog could be useful for something other than social grandeur.

Truthfully, my first thought upon accepting the idea of using a blog was to just use an existing content management system that I had written. The system is not fully functional yet, but includes the basics that a blog system would need. The downside is that its designed for the publication of news articles rather than blogging. While a lot of the features are the same, I wanted something more tailored to blogging so I could have that happy funtime integration with the great blogosphere web 2.0 value added blah blah blah…. sorry, snapped into buzzword land for a second.

I probably wouldn’t have even broken from my idea of just using my CMS if it hadn’t been for a friend of mine trying to learn web design and having a book lying around. I am a an excellent programmer and could even be considered a special in automation with web systems, but I am a horrble user interface designer, so he’s picking up the artsy portions to cover my shortfalls.

While looking through the books to see what I thought was useful I came upon a chapter about “Cool things to add to your website”. I at first just blew past this, thinking it was probably web counters and guestbooks, but I ran across them giving a demo of blogger and stopped. The thing that caught my eye about blogger was that it uploaded the static files to your server when you changed them. This was very nice in my opinion since I’ve been developing a cache system for my CMS that mixes static output and the coralCDN to save me from the diff effect or death by slashdot. The static files output by blogger could be handled very nicely by the CDN and they’re served in no time flat by a reasonably good server, even under heavy loads.

While I like blogger, I like to have more control over my system than that. So I flipped back over to word press. I like wordpress because of its open source nature and insane customizability. The downside of it is that its 100% dynamic and could roast a nice webserver easily under the digg effect. I decided that this is the blog I would go with, (like you hadn’t noticed) because I figure that I can customize it all to hell if its not performing up to my load expectations.

To get started on my customizing I first did the 5 minute install from their web sites directions. And yes, its actually less than 5 minutes. Open phpmyadmin, add DB, add user, add user to DB, scp files over, modify wp-config.php to with DB/user name, and last hit the website… Bam, instant blog goodness.

I immediately installed the WP-Cache 2.0 which caches page displays. It does not create a static cache though, and that bothers me a little. In this system the php environment is still initialized and all the includes up to that point are loaded. While not truthfully a big deal, I am used to tweaking servers for extreme load and I like to plan ahead in case I ever say something of worth to someone and I get dugg. I intend to look into this in the future though as I see it having an immense improvement. User logins would be a tough one to figure out for that though.

The second and third things I did were get my api key for akismet, and install the bad behavior plugin. Bad behavior is stopping things so far that it says are bad people, but I’m not sure if thats the case. I’m probably going to enable verbose logging so I can check that out. The combination of these 2 plugins should cut down the amount of spam that I have greatly. This is one of my fears, as I don’t intend to sit around cleaning up this site. I’ll disable comments and trackbacks pretty quickly if it starts to be a problem. I may look for or write a plugin to disable comments on any pages over a certain age.

With the OCD perfectionist thing going on, I couldn’t let the digg effect go. After searching around I found a plugin called the Digg Defender, which will send all incoming people from digg to the coralCDN and off my servers. This has the huge downside though that PHP and a plugin is added before this happens, but its an ok short term solution. I intend to come up with a better way to do this in the future. Probably using a trick I’m experimenting with to get mod_rewrite to know the servers load and redirect appropriately. That way the server automaticly sheds the load when its going to croak, regardless of incoming referrer. That will protect me from sites not in my little “catch” list.

Good stuff so far, I still need to get cracking on a good theme though. I’ve been over the wordpress template instructions and its pretty simple. Wordpress makes the information available to templates in a standardized way and then executes them via includes. Basic, but effective. I was hoping for a more abstract approach. I’d like to see smarty and wordpress integrated so that less programming savy designers could shoulder the fancy work. I am a big fan of smarty for that exact reason, there is a clear boundry where visual and the control.

Well I’ve rambled on enough. Welcome to day 2 of my experiment