< VENT > I am not going to mention names here because that will certainly get me into some hot water — and I don’t really have the time to deal with the fallout BS at the moment – but who else here has noticed how shitty some of the popular blog software is out here? Not all of it, some of the software is good and I’ll leave it up to the readers to separate the wheat from the chaff. There are some good products that scale with traffic well, but there are also some well known and popular blog programs which completely fall apart when they face any kind of traffic or usage on the server.

Where can you usually see the problems in action? In the comment section! I don’t get it. Why have a comment section if nobody can quickly and easily comment? If you try to comment on a post that should take no more than 1 second, even on an extremely busy site, but yet I try and make comments on some popular blogger’s sites that use popular blogging programs with my very fast cable connection and sometimes it times out or falls apart completely. One site I am thinking of right now takes an average of 30 seconds to post a comment. I know, I’ve sat and looked at clock tick away waiting and wondering if my words would need to be cut and pasted again (I learned not to trust your one and only copy in the form when it comes to leaving comments on a blog). I have ended up with duplicate posts sometimes too because I couldn’t tell that the comment takes. WTF?! 

This is clearly either the result of inferior, over-crowded cheap hosting and/or a blog program that was poorly written to scale and/or some combination thereof.  I know there’s a lot of dependence on adding new goodies and features to blogs because users love new features but when one’s blog is running so slow that it takes 45+ seconds to post a comment — maybe if it even works at all — then perhaps it’s time to back off on the goodies and look for a new program and/or a new host?

And the fact that some of these programs are ‘popular’ is even more puzzling. I know a lot of coders donate their time so it might not be their absolute best work to some of these projects (mods that people end up using that slow down programs too), but as a coder myself, I’d be ashamed to know that a product or hack or mod falls apart under certain conditions that isn’t disclosed to users in advance (for example: “this script/mod is only good for up to 1000 visitors a day and then you’ll need a more professional solution” OR “this is good for up to 3,000 posts and then you’ll need a more professional solution”). Aren’t the developers of some of these overburdened commercial programs doing any load testing?

Instead, all we most often hear as users is how many great, whiz-bang features there are and look here what we do to the comment spam, blah, blah, blah. Screw that, just show me something that actually works with a decent server when your blog does more than 500 - 1000 visitors a day.

I can understand the concept of writing an application for a specific target audience, but any new commercial blog program on the market should scale up to 25,000 users a day out of the box and be able to handle a target of 10,000 posts and hundreds of categories using high end virtual hosting or entry-level dedicated hosting. If the program doesn’t handle at least to these specs before running into problems it isn’t allowing for any serious expansion for a blogger or group blogging effort.

Look, I’ve been blogging very, very much in my spare time for a year and this blog has nearly 1000 entries. I already know from the developers of this program (which nothing in my rant here is about the program I’m using for this blog, BTW) that this program will fall apart around 5,000 posts. The developer is already working on a solution for beyond this number of posts. That’s what I call a smart developer. He recognizes that a flat file scheme has limitations and he’s working on something to do about it. He wanted this script to be available to as many people as possible so he didn’t make it have to be based on a database. However, for those with busier blogs with more entries, a more powerful backend storage system is needed. Folks who start their own personal blog, will probably never reach 5,000 posts so it won’t likely be an issue for them. I get that. It’s smart.

But if the commercial blog program — something me, you or somebody else is paying for – is so poorly written that it requires a dual Xeon processor with a gig of ram just to build 10,000 pages or handle 3,000 visitors a day and/or more than a couple seconds of time to post a freaking comment, then there is definitely something wrong. Ahh, instead of bitching I should just write my own program and jump into the pool to compete against these folks, shouldn’t I? Who knows, maybe I will. Maybe I will. </ VENT >

Did this post make you go hmm?

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