:]

:[

Let’s say I’m writing a blog where I frequently post lots of travel photographs. Naturally, I put all of these photographs below the fold because I don’t want to swamp the main page with hundreds of photographs contained in just a few days’ worth of posts. With Blogger’s crappy CSS hack, all of the photographs are downloaded for anyone visiting the main page, only to be hidden by the stylesheet! We’re talking about potentially dozens of megabytes of wasted bandwidth on each load of your main page. So much for snappy loading times on your blog, and if your bandwidth is metered, God help you.

Or imagine someone who is writing a serial novel on a blog. Let’s say each installment is 50 KB including mark-up, with all but the first few paragraphs hidden below the fold on each post. Loading the main page is going to require downloading hundreds of KB of inline text, and unlike the image example, in which the browser might theoretically defer from downloading images it knows aren’t going to be displayed yet (assuming it’s downloaded the stylesheet first, so it knows the images won’t be seen), there’s absolutely nothing the browser can do to prevent having to download all of that inline HTML. Hopefully now you realize how the CSS hack isn’t just bad, it’s inexcusable. Ditto for inlining the stylesheet with each page, which is utterly bad web practice. And if you’re really so worried about performance with below-the-fold handled in the correct way, just enable caching on your blog. Then each page load will require precisely zero PHP calls, because the HTML output itself has been cached. Hard to get more efficient than that.

As for the theme I’m using, I would describe it as spartan, not simple. It’s not a standard WordPress theme; it was developed by a friend of a friend and then modified both by the friend and then later me. I have messed around in the realm of customization a lot and this is what I settled on. I’m sorry if you don’t like, but don’t assume that just because I’ve gone for the spartan look (or the function-over-form look, as it were), that I haven’t played around with all of the WordPress extensibility options, because I have done so extensively. You might be surprised to learn that this blog has 19 plugins installed, for example. Most of them just aren’t very visible because they’re focused on the practical rather than the flashy (for instance, caching, anti-spam, upgrades to the admin interface, stats, permalink tweaking, etc.).

William: I definitely noticed the lackluster WYSIWYG Blogger editor, especially the poor HTML editor. I guess I forgot to mention it in my post. My friend was having problems doing something as simple as resetting custom formatting in the WYSIWYG editor. I couldn’t find a button to do it. And the WYSIWYG editor encourages terrible web behavior, like defining fonts and such on a per-post basis instead of doing it once in the stylesheet and writing each blog post in unadulterated text. I like WordPress because it encourages that things be done the correct way, and it makes it easy to do so. There are no explicity formatting options in any of my posts. Everything is handled by stylesheets. It doesn’t matter so much now, but if I ever wanted to change the look of my site?

Heather: Yes, the wealth of WordPress plugins are amazing. What I especially like is that since they are in PHP they are necessarily open source (though not necessarily Free Software). I’ve had to hack up some plugins before to get them to do exactly what I want, and I always appreciate that this is possible.

I do have some gripes, though. As an example, the “Edit HTML” view doesn’t allow you to edit HTML as much as it allows you to input HTML tags into your text instead of using the GUI to do it with a single click or keyboard shortcut. But it counts all line breaks in the “Edit HTML” view as [space added here to get the tag to render as text], which is just stupid.
As an example, you know?

However, WP’s way is actually more work for the server. More lines of code means more stuff to do and more delays before the content is served up. Simply hiding something via CSS is super-fast in comparison, and while it’s not “cool” it’s certainly not a bad solution. Sometimes the more elegant solutions are overkill, but WP seems to be built on the opposite notion.

Given that you’re still using a very simple theme I’ll assume you haven’t messed around with anything in the realm of customization. If you were ever in the business of creating your own theme or modifying an existing one, WP’s got some serious power behind it in this area. The whole system regarding its themes, plugins, templates, “The Loop”, etc. is well done from an ease of use and extensibility perspective. You can do some pretty crazy stuff with it.

WP does indeed put your server through a vigorous workout since at any given time it’s running thousands of lines of PHP code where a simpler blogging system might run a couple hundred. I reckon that given equal server power you could randomly click through twice or thrice the number of Blogger blogs as opposed to WP blogs. WP ones will simply run more code, make more queries, and do more shit for every page load.

But at least it’s got features! :P