mh-z web-log

I’ve noticed that this blog is becoming somewhat unreliable and frequently taking a long time to load. Is this because WordPress is ineficiently coded and running through reams of PHP code in rendering the page? But after the page is rendered once, it should be cached by the wp-cache plugin and so subsequent loads should be fast. I note that the administrative console is rather slow, too, but it does seem to load consistently and doesn’t time out (as the main blog page itself does). Also, once I’ve loaded a number of pages and navigated around my site a bit, the server’s responses become quicker and more reliable. Is load balancing giving me more resources, learning my route, or some such? The response data itself can’t be cached, but can other aspects? Database queries? In general, though, perhaps DreamHost is just more burdened than it once was. Perhaps it’s time to move on. But I do have faith in those guys. And the one factor I absolutely love about DH is the customized control panel application, which blows cpanel and all other commodity-webhost online-configuration-management tools I’ve seen out of the water. I’m not ready to give that up.

Moved to [http://www.dreamhost.com DreamHost].

Textpattern is limited in that I can’t independently create sections and pages. What I’d like to do is create an array of pages and then create, as it were, “views” which tie together a particular section with a particular page.

I.e., a “page” should correspond to a way of mapping the entry database to HTML. A “section” should correspond to a way of selecting articles out of the database, based on a singular tag or a more complex set of rules. Then we should have “views”, which say “present section X using page Y”.

The problem is that (1) A given article may only belong to one section, and (2) Textpattern only lets us assign a specific page to a specific section. So let’s say I want to have two different renderings of the articles on the front page, one with a larger font and different color set, and one which only shows the first, say, 50 words of each post. Apparently I can’t do this.

This is just a temporary solution, because I want to create a better piece of blogging software at some point (and I’m dearthing on time). Not necessarily more configurable and flexible, but just something for me to use. What would be nice, and I’ve posted this before elsewhere, but I’ll reiterate, is the following feature set:

(1) Articles may be shown as excerpts on the front page; however pressing “more” or ‘(+)’ loads the rest of the article, still on the front page, using an AJAX-style data load and dynamic page manipulation.

(2) The “add-comment” form is available and hidden on the main page below each full article. Press the “comment” link and the form instantly appears. Adding a comment is done asynchronously, without ever leaving the main page.

(4) Viewing and paging through comments is done asynchronously, also on the main page.

I’m surprised no blogging tools support AJAX yet, considering that it’s really not that complex to implement what I’m talking about, above. Time to put my money (or fingers?) where my mouth is and start coding this, then.

When I say “the ‘Opera’ of Blogging software”, what I mean is that just like Firefox and Opera differ, in that Firefox is very extensible and it’s easy to add tons of plugins (in fact, you need to, to get certain functionality), Opera has all this optimized and built-in. As a consequence it’s not as extensible, but it does what you want. For example, if you want to save the tabs you have open in your current session so you can restart your computer and come back to the same set of windows/tabs you had open before, Opera has this built in. With Firefox, you’ll need the incredible Tab Mix Plus.

Okay, comments do work now. :)

Comments don’t work quite yet, I know.

Awesome collection of free high-resolution desktop wallpaper. The Windows XP themes are pretty neat, too.