TylerM – Tyler Menezes

So, recently Linus Torvalds (the “benevolent dictator” of Linux) started blogging, using the ever-popular Blogspot website. Blogger is an interesting platform to me. Initially, their engine generated only static HTML, so whenever a post was changed or a comment added, the blog would have to undergo a “publishing” process where the HTML pages were generated. A little while ago, Blogger added dynamic functionality; blogs hosted on the Blogger servers could connect to a database to get information, thus bypassing the publishing delay.

Blogger has, from the beginning, allowed users to host blogs on their own servers. By doing this, users can’t use the dynamic publishing, mostly for reasons of compatibility for servers without access to PHP/Perl/ASP/et cetra, I’d assume. However, static pages do provide some major benefits if you’re going to be hosting it on your own servers. Because they’re not complied by any sort of scripting language on the server, page loads are fast and server stress is low. Further, there’s no communication with a back-end database server, so the load times are even faster. Sites published this way tend to better resist the “Digg/Slashdot effect”, especially on shared servers like Dreamhost where CPU usage is metered. However, there’s quite a lag when posting comments or adding/editing articles while the HTML is regenerated and sent over the internet to your server.

Other applications which can be run on your server (or on a local machine) to generate a blog with static HTML files exist, so even if you don’t trust Google with your data, it’s still pretty easy to do. So, knowing the benefits of each approach, which do you prefer?

This blog is powered by Wordpress, though I used Blogger for about three years. (The archived version of the old Blogger blog is at http://blog.tylerm.info/, for link compatibility from when the “blog” subdomain was the only way to access it). I’ll take features over scalability any day, but I want to know your thoughts.