Inspirational Technology

Still thinking about Blosxom

I'm still thinking about converting this site to running on a Blosxom derivative, in particular on Pyblosxom. I spent a fair amount of time over the last week getting everything working in a test setup and I've worked everything out, except I'm worried about the performance of it. Even running on my dual 1.25Ghz Powermac there's a noticeable delay when viewing a page. This concerns me as the server this site runs on is only a dual 266Mhz Pentium II. I haven't tested it on this machine yet. This really shouldn't be a major problem as this site doesn't get all that much traffic and the network is kind of slow anyway, but CGI scripts always bug me. This is the one good thing about MovableType, it's slow to post, but that's because it creates static pages for everything.

The Perl version of Blosxom can also be used to generate static pages, the Python version can't.

So far I've written four plugins for Pybosxom to make it as compatible with the current site as possible. I had to add RSS 1.0 support, Textile formatting support and a post body summarize function. Along with these I also created a new plugin that tracks referrers and hit counts on a per post basis. That one was more my experimenting with Berkeley DB XML then anything, but it's very useful.

Anyway, now I'm stuck trying to decide whether to go with Pyblosxom, go with the original Perl Blosxom or to punt on the whole thing and just stick with MovableType.