DISQUS

Lulu · 1 year ago

English, Chinese or otherwise, you's hot.

yongfook · 1 year ago

we're talking about computers here. calm yourself.

yongfook · 1 year ago

p.s. for those who are late to the show, in this post I'm referring to my recent switch from a conventional Wordpress blog to a custom-built "microblog" that uses Tumblr and Code Igniter. The previous blog can be found here: http://archive.yongfook.com

Celso · 1 year ago

Now what was that website that links to other websites...you know, the one where you see loads of those 10 item lists...the one with the pseudo-controversial titles...bah..can't remember now. I'll do some *digging* to try and find out what it was..

And, by the way, I totally agree with you but not everyone masters PHP to a level where they can just create their own blogging platform. THAT is the beauty of WordPress. It's just so bloody accessible to the non-geek peasant.

yongfook · 1 year ago

no I completely understand that. My reasons for ditching Wordpress are not here to convince the masses - I'm just explaining why, after so many years of using Wordpress, I think I've outgrown it. I even owe Wordpress itself a lot in making this decision - I started hacking around with Wordpress maybe 3 years ago now and were it not for that long pedigree of experimenting and breaking stuff in Wordpress' safe, understandable environment, my php coding skills would never have become what they are now. Wordpress is a great environment to learn - but it doesn't scale - eventually you will be looking for better, cleaner and more standards-based ways of manipulating your blog data.

Celso · 1 year ago

As I said, I agree and understand your decision. And to be honest, I kinda feel really dependent on WordPress, and for all the reasons you pointed out. It's really refreshing to see something this different and that's why I said in your previous post ( maybe a bit over-enthusiastically ) that you should turn this into a service/app.

I really want to know how you fetch stuff from Tumblr btw.

Celso · 1 year ago

I just saw the Tumblelog embed function. So I gets it now, it's actually much simpler than it looks. Great work nonetheless!

yongfook · 1 year ago

actually that's not what I'm doing.

I'm using the API to pull in data items into my own database and then displaying them with a custom built front end app. If you just look at the source of my site you'll see it's not just a simple embed.

Celso · 1 year ago

I would have tried to embed it and style everything on the same stylesheet to make it look coherent. I don't know if you can do it like that.

I'm sure the way you did it makes much more sense. I just try to find solutions around my own limitations.

Looking forward to seeing how you pulled it off :)

yongfook · 1 year ago

Well I'm sure that would be possible, but it wouldn't be very search-engine friendly. Search engines would just see a script tag instead of any content. Also it would mean loading content externally each time you load a page on your site, which would slow things down.

All will be explained soon. The solution is still quite simple, but it's definitely not as simple as just adding an embedded script, unfortunately!

brian · 1 year ago

i think its a great migration based on what you do, and decentralising your uploads, and yet aggregating everything back to a well designed and customised domain name -) it is pretty cool indeed -)

wiffy · 1 year ago

Hi I'm noobcook! I really like your blog's new concept and I wish I can do the same for my own personal blog (not my food blog) ... except for a very small problem about being computer illiterate :P Do u plan to, say, make a tutorial anytime soon? :P

yongfook · 1 year ago

yep as soon as possible - I'm swamped with work now though :/
maybe this weekend I'll put together a tutorial.

wiffy · 1 year ago

thank you!! =O

pedro rica · 1 year ago

"you's hot" ... ROTFL!

Jay · 1 year ago

Curious but what other CMS have you tried using before? I've used WP and ExpressionEngine, both are very good. I'm testing out Textpattern right now, it's pretty good but not as user friendly as WP but the code is extremely clean and lightweight for a CMS.

yongfook · 1 year ago

I've tried all of the above plus some of the newer alternatives like Joomla and Drupal, neither of which I liked very much. Code Igniter is based on the Expression Engine (or the other way around, or something) but I think the problem is I've moved away from wanting a full-blown CMS for my needs. I've narrowed down what my requirements actually are and the thing that suits me the best is a clear, simple framework; a blank slate on which I can write the exact functionality that I need, to work with *other* services that provide the content editing / photo editing etc services better than one giant CMS can.

Jay · 1 year ago

Thanks Yongfook. Could you order them in the preference you like the most/best?

Marcus · 1 year ago

20 queries per page is nothing. Sure it might be more than you'd think should be required but it would hardly classify it as a resource hog. Caching also has it's downside - obviously I have no idea how you've implemented it but caching on any large scale kinda system generally scales badly (I've found out the hard way!).

I think it really depends on how serious you are about blogging and what your level of technical expertise is. I'd generally recommend a hosted platform as they're getting better and better these days and they are even customisable/plugin-able to a certain extent - but then again I'm biased (disclosure: I'm lead technical architect on Webjam which is an (MVC based ;)) hosted cms/blogging/social networking platform). If you're more technically minded, then wordpress or even a custom system like you've written can probably suit you individual needs slightly better, but this certainly isn't the case for most people.

Marcus
http://www.webjam.com
http://www.chickerino.com

yongfook · 1 year ago

Marcus,

Thanks for your comment. I don't want to get into some silly pissing war here, but I do feel you are making an unfair comparison. My individual blog, compared to a hosted platform that has to serve hundreds (thousands?) of different blogs each with their own audiences and traffic levels will of course have to have a massively different scalability strategy.

Anyway, I agree - caching is not the be all and end all, but it's a decent enough solution for an individual's blog like mine.

Also, when trying to make a page load more efficiently one of the areas you can look at - and it's disingenuous to deny this - is making queries snappier. This involves a lot of trial and error - for example, can I make one expensive query in the place of 5 separate queries, and is that expensive query going to hit the database more or less than doing it all separately.

My point about a page with many, many queries on it was more about the carefree attitude to plugins that Wordpress kind of encourages you to foster. Your blog could begin as a model of efficiency but as soon as you start adding all these plugins written by unknown people you open yourself up to serving a page that has many more db hits than you intended, and sometimes these can be very expensive requests (a popular addition is one of those "related posts" plugins - these in particular are really fat queries) which just add up and up to the undisciplined or uneducated blog owner and make your pages very inefficient.

Marcus · 1 year ago

Indeed the scaling issues certainly don't apply for one off sites.

I think part of the reason that Wordpress plugins are so inefficient is like you say that they use so much code and are not part of an MVC framework - which would certainly more easily facilitate the re-use of certain bits of data without having to re-query the database. The other problem that Wordpress has is that it's simply old. Therefore it has the legacy of having to support (or not break) all of the old plugins when they upgrade. This really hinders their ability to do a proper 'modern' re-write of the whole system.

roger · 1 year ago

Me likey CodeIgniter and your solution for using it as WordPress' front-end is brilliant. I used CI for _all_ of my projects these days, unless there's a compelling reason not to... like silly client wants WordPress or something ree-tahded.

I used ExpressionEngine on a client website and noticed issues similar to your complaints about WordPress; particularly the number of queries performed on each page load. Thankfully though, the Ellis Lab folks have done a great job with that product, allowing you to use various caching methods and turning off certain db queries at a pretty granular level.

Jens · 1 year ago

I love this new way of consolidating content. I wonder how this system would work for someone (like me) who tends to upload photos in larger batches of 50+ snaps (say from a trip etc). Would that cause 50 entries to be created on your top page and RSS feed? Or would it be possible to make the system recognize the upload as a single event and give you an entry like "uploaded 50 pics..." etc.? Just curious!

yongfook · 1 year ago

as I noted in a separate blog post, yes, if I uploaded like 50 photos to flickr then in the system's current incarnation all those photos would spew over my blog's front page. But again as I said in the previous post, this is just a problem to be solved. It would certainly be possible to filter photos via tags, or to as you suggest consolidate photos posted in succession into a single "uploaded 50 pics" post. I'll solve these problems as I come to them, though. If I sat here tying to anticipate every possible problematic eventuality this blog platform would become my full time job and it was simply meant to be a little weekend project.

Arthur · 1 year ago

Nice work. Interesting idea to use Wordpress as the interface for adding content to the database, and then building a custom front end. I'd really recommend looking into Django as a better alternative. You design your own database schema, and it creates the admin interface — automatically! Well, in about two lines of code. The admin app is so much better than Wordpress, and Django template and model code is so easy to write. Seriously, best thing I ever did work wise was moving from PHP to Django/Python.

yongfook · 1 year ago

Python fills me with fear....I'd be starting from like zero, no?

Arthur · 1 year ago

No Man. If I can do it — and I probably have 1% of code skills compared to you — then you can pick it up no sweat. Python is so easy to read and understand. Plus it's named after a snake, which is much more ace than Personal Home Page or something.

yongfook · 1 year ago

hmmm true. But then someone will come out with a scripting language with a better name like "Anaconda" or "Fricking King Cobra, Dude" and we'll all have to start over again.

brian · 1 year ago

+1 biiiiilllllion points tor you for bringing Disqus to my attention. I hadn't even THOUGHT of outsourcing comments in an app I'm working on right now. It would make it ten times easier and probably... 1 or 2 times more secure. :-)

yongfook · 1 year ago

makes a lot of sense, eh?

Stephen · 1 year ago

Yeah, my experience with Wordpress self-hosting was disastrous...a friggin' THEME UPDATE messed up my comments big time. I'm on wordpress.com for now, which is stable and free, but it would be interesting to be able to do something like what you have here.

reese · 1 year ago

Hi there,
Your posts on this and the lifestream have me more inspired about design and dev possibilities than I've been in 2+ years. Thank you for the lovely nuggets of inspiration--I am beside myself with glee :)

Morki · 1 year ago

I was reading this wondering, What provoked this spaz attack? Then I got to "Upgrading Wordpress can be a nightmare
I recently tried to upgrade to 2.3 and it borked on me."

Ah.

Your homemade theme, huh? Too modified to debug and fix? The "Windows" of themes?

"Wordpress is quite the resource hog."

There may be some other problem you haven't diagnosed. Looking at Compete/Quantcast/Alexa, you have about 2 percent of my traffic, and I'm not having any load problems.

yongfook · 1 year ago

ooh ooh lets compare dick sizes!

Lets brush aside the fact that Alexa/Compete/whatever 3rd party
analytics tool that requires all users to have a browser plugin to
calculate numbers are horribly skewed - because I'm not going to sit
here and pretend my blog gets mad traffic. I have, however, worked on
a number of very high traffic sites where we either rolled out
production sites based on wordpress or did some A/B tests and found
that Wordpress dies very easily without fat resources behind it. You
can use all the fancy optimisation plugins you want, the fact of the
matter is Wordpress as a "framework" is quite heavy. So with this
knowledge, I don't really want to use Wordpress to serve the front end
of *anything* I do from now on - not because I expect huge traffic on
all my projects, but because if I'm able to put together a more
efficient, faster-loading front-end alternative*, why the hell
shouldn't I? Not a particularly hard decision there.

As for the other point, the uprgrade bork had nothing to do with my
theme. It just totally destroyed my schema (I think at some point
from 2.0 ~ 2.3 they completely changed the schema, to introduce the
new "terms" concept) and I lost all my categories, they just got
erased in the DB. Yes, I had backups, yes I tried it again and again
- but really once you've wasted any amount of time on that kind of
thing - just dead time because the software didn't do what it was
supposed to do - it's very frustrating. And from that point I started
to think about rolling my own software that I would have more control
over.

*I still totally see the value in using WP as a CMS though, and if you read the article all the way through you'd know that. I just think it does a pretty meh job at actually displaying content. You can write a simple MVC app that pulls data for display from the WP db very easily, and will be more efficient and easier to maintain (i.e. you write your own extra functionality using standard class files in a standardised application structure instead of getting into a hell of using all these random plugins shoved in your plugins folder) than a WP theme. Of course, this isn't a solution for everyone - I'm not suggesting everyone drops WP this instant. But definitely people who have confidence in their programming skills can adopt this approach, which as I said, is how I tackle most client work these days. WP backend with a custom-built, highly maintainable and extensible front end application built in a more efficient framework.

kelly · 1 year ago

Your header is qool....so are your thoughts on Wordpress. A wordpress upgrade can spell headache but it also keeps many addicted to it. Have you heard of Modx? What are your thoughts on it?

Great blog entry by the way YF! Keep going!