I was amused to have finished migrating this blog over to WordPress to read this article on Coding Horror:
I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the community around WordPress, and the software itself is remarkably polished. That’s not to say that I haven’t run into a few egregious bugs in the 2.5 release, but on the whole, the experience has been good bordering on pleasant.
Or at least it was, until I noticed how much CPU time the PHP FastCGI process was using for modest little old blog.stackoverflow.com.
I’m not alone; just do a web search on WordPress CPU usage or WordPress Digg Effect and you’ll find page after page of horror stories, most (all?) of which are solved by the swift and judicious application of the WP-Cache plugins.
It’s not like this a new issue. Personally, I think it’s absolutely irresponsible that WP-Cache like functionality isn’t already built into WordPress. I would not even consider deploying WordPress anywhere without it. And yet, according to a recent podcast, Matt Mullenweg dismisses it out of hand and hand-wavingly alludes to vague TechCrunch server reconfigurations.
Oh well, I’ve installed the caching plugin and thus won’t get stroppy messages from my hosting company about server load. Hopefully.
I’ve finally managed to make the blog page look vaguely like the rest of the site, though this was a somewhat frustrating problem. Making changes to the theme isn’t anywhere near as easy as on Blogspot.
The hardest bit was dealing with my blogroll. This is auto generated by Bloglines, as I described a while ago. Annoyingly Bloglines spits out a bit of HTML with each link contained within a <div> element. I needed <li> elements as the sidebar is built as sets of bulletted lists. In the end I managed to do the conversion using XSL Transforms. They’re neat.