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Drupal vs Wordpress vs Blogger vs Mediawiki vs Roll-your-own

Note: This post oscillates between serious analysis and cheap, crude jokes. I was reading a lot of Mark Prindle's music reviews at the time; this post is a bit of an homage to his writing style.

I still have no idea what authoring software I'll end up using. Hence the sparseness of posts, and the software-centric nature of those few posts that bubble to the surface.

So far, Wordpress seems the most blogging friendly of the tools I've tried. At least, that's what I'm saying right now, while I use it to type this stupid blog entry ("stupid blog" is the opposite of an oxymoron; I forget what the word is… oxygenius?). I like Wordpress's('s's) ease of authoring (via WYSIWYG controls and keyboard shortcuts) and relative ease of customization (letting me have my own template). I also like parentheses; can you tell? (Can you?)

Blogger was easy too, but, um, well, to be honest I just wanted something a little less "LCD". By "LCD" I mean "Loser Can Do (It)". There's those parentheses again… So anyway like anyways like anyway like… ROFL LOL RTFM STFU etc… See what I mean? Blogger booger. Too easy. I wanted some software that I had to install myself. I wanted a snobby/techie filtering element. I wanted to feel part of the elite because that is oh so important to me, because I am such an uber-geeker. Ha! Snort. SPUMA (shoving pencils up my …)

No, to be honest, I just wanted control over the code. That way:

  1. If the blogging software company (e.g., blogger.com) goes bust, I am not affected because I have my own copy of the code. Dependency on other people sucks!
  2. I get to see what other PHP coders are writing. How do they make it easy to plug in modules, patches, templates, and hacks? I consider this off-the-clock research for my day job.
  3. I can hack the fudge out of the software. This lets me have my standard Tripalot header and look and feel. Yay. Because everyone knows that Tripalot is at the cutting edge of web site aesthetics. Well, ergonomics is more like it. Actually, inertianomics is more like it. 🙂

Of course, the irony is that people can get their blogs hosted on Wordpress.com for free. This means anyone can get a Wordpress blog. Sigh. End result is there's a ton of other poop-headed baby-tards writing their stupid "I am so important" blogs about their stupid stupid thoughts. God, I hate blogs.

Sorry, I just hate blogs so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, parentheses. (Yeah). I like parentheses. Or, as we call them in eliteville, "parens". Of course, the uber-uber-uber-techno-brainiac few (of us) call them "bananas". Every day I have bananas on my raisin bran. That is so, so important for the world to know. Hey world, read me! Read me! My bananas are your bananas!

Not really. Hands off my bananas. Yeah, get your grubby paws off my sleek, wit-gilded bananas.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, bananas. (a/k/a bananarentheses)

Ok, if I seem distracted, it's because:

  1. My hands are cold.
  2. I'm hungry (again) (and no I'm not a fat and/or pimply geek like the rest of the Wordpressiverse).
  3. There are way too many "bananas" in this post for comfort; I'm starting to feel "banana"ed out! What a stupid one-off meme anyway. Stupid meme! Bad meme! Spank the meme! Whip it good! Amen brother!
  4. I can't figure out if this is auto-saving or not. (Not that it would be disasterous if it's not. If it's snot.)
  5. When I saved a draft, Wordpress messed up one of my paragraph spacings. Grrrr. WYSIWYG should be WYSIWYG, Mr. and Mrs. Wordpress authors. Stop messing up my expectations, dudes and dudettes. Stop twiddling with my angst buttons you banana-bestowing gods and goddesses.
  6. How can I add spacing between these bullets?
  7. Does Wordpress have a built-in "nonsense" checker?
  8. Why's it getting slow? The response time is getting so sluggish right now.
  9. Okay, I saved again and it seems better. Hmm. Does this mean I need to keep saving? Eek, it's getting slow again. Grrrrrrilla luv banana!
  10. A'ight that's enough blabber for now. On with the shizow!
  11. Enough, Travis, zip it!

So, um, yeah… Wordpress, Blogger, etc. Hmm. Gosh, I am bored with this topic already. After saying so little, so precious little, about it. What a waste of time (yours and mine) and space (mine all mine my preciousss– STFU JRR is so old school ya dork!). Hrmmm…

Man, Wordpress is messing up again. It keeps jumping to the top of the post whenever I delete a leading space from a new paragraph. And it's getting slow again. Sooo slowww…. Maybe WYSIWYG in a browser is like security in Vista? Not quite there, holmes? (Not that I would know anything about Vista – I'm loath to try it until at least SP1 or SP2 or SPWAW). Ha! (subtle joke alert).

Argh! Wordpress keeps messing me up! Stupid stupid 'tarded Wordpress authors!!!! Jeesh!

So lemme hurry this Fokker up.

Drupal seems powerful. I like its modules. And I have a book on it, which means I learn little bits of it at night.

(Wordpress is covered in the book too, so maybe I will learn to respect Wordpress although right now its WYSIWYG editing is peeing me o. Process Explorer says Firefox is taking 98% of the CPU. WTF? It's not like I am blogging about rocket science or anything… Why would Firefox be brought to its knees by Wordpress's little old posting interface? That really sux the meme's bananas!)

(Oh great. I just started a new paragraph. Wordpress threw in extra white space. If I delete it, I'll jump to the top. Man, WYSWIWYG editing sucks. Frontpage and Dreamweaver were 'tarded about it too, so maybe I need to cut Wordpress some slack. Or maybe not. I want WYIWSIWYG to work, darn it! Come on, all you "genius" open source authors out there. Fix these stupid javascript bugs!)

Sheesh. So, um, yeah, Drupal… I like it, so far. Not love it, though. It's hard to love anything when Wordpress's stupid WYSIWYG editor is putting me in such a foul mood. I hate it when software gets in the way of creativity. Not that I was being particularly creative, but you know… If I were trying to do something meaningful here, I would be furious with all this sluggishness and white space bugginess. Slugs and bugs abound in Wordpressiapolis!

Drupal cool. But intimidating. I was able to hack my blogger and wordpress templates pretty quickly. For some reason I haven't messed with Drupal too much yet. Perhaps because I'm progressing through the book linearly… Or maybe since Drupal crams more administrative options in its main interface (as opposed to having a link to an administrative area), there's more pressure to preserve the default content and layout? Eh, well, I hope I can hack Drupal to look more like the rest of my site. Then I can ditch this annoying Wordpress (which I no longer like; see how fickle I am?; see how interface bugs can murder your customer base?).

And then there's Mediawiki. Or, rather, "'Mediawiki"'. Lots of typing. Lots of debugging. Vanilla-looking pages. Aesthetically barren, but neat history options and easy linking. We use it at work, but it doesn't feel relaxing enough to use for my "fun" personal pages. (How much fun am I having right now with this post? None, thanks to Wordpress's horrible WYSIWYG glitches).

Finally, I can always roll my own. That would be the ultimate in geek cred, but would also be the ultimate in wheel reinvention. I'd rather leave CMS authoring to people with lots of free time (and patience for beta software).

Okay, enough bananas; I'm oughta here!

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Update (minutes later):

Something else was making Firefox sluggish. When I closed the browser, a Firefox process remained, still consuming 98% CPU. So there's a chance that the sluggishness wasn't Wordpress's fault. Plus, I have over a dozen Firefox extensions, so one of them could have been (grease)monkeying things up.

Also, even though Wordpress's editor doesn't add white space between list items, my CSS does, so I just need to ignore the lack of white space in the editor. Of course, that diminishes the accuracy of WYIWISIWYG, doesn't it? Hmm.

Regardless, Wordpress's WYSIYWISWYG whitespace handling is still annoying. And guess what; while I've typed this update, Firefox's CPU amount has crept up to 70%. So I wouldn't be surprised if there's some conflict between Wordpress and one of the extensions.

Firefox CPU usage is now at 96%. Sigh. I'll close Firefox (again) and open it, but not Wordpress, and see if it's still CPU-hungry.

—————————–

Another update (minutes later):

Um, the 96% CPU dropped away when I left the page. I tried reproducing the apparent memory/CPU leak (is there such thing as a CPU leak?) by creating a test page, but no luck; I couldn't get the CPU to sustain a high level. As soon as I stopped editing, the CPU would sink to 0. Hmmm…

Now here I am editing this post again. The CPU keeps dancing between around 20% and 0%, depending on whether I am typing. Okay, I will stop typing for ten seconds…

Interesting. The CPU leveled off at around 20% and would not go below 18%. This implies that some script is periodically updating, even when I am not typing. Perhaps there's an auto-save feature?

Eek, I just saw the CPU go back up into the 90s again. now it's around 60 – 80%. Hmmm. I will stop typing for 20 seconds…

Ah, so it's levelling at 75% now. Something's definitely bonkers with Wordpress's memory/cpu management.

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