After reading my rant about comment spammers, Joel asked me if I’d thought about switching over to another weblogging system. Here’s a (somewhat expanded) copy of what I sent back.
I’ve enjoyed reading your site (and its comments) ever since TypePad… and I bring this up as an honest suggestion. Why not try out WordPress? It’s simple and while it’s not immune to comment spam there are a wealth of plug-ins and options that filter or destroy them quite nicely.
Switching systems is definitely one of the things on the “possible solutions” list (WordPress and ExpressionEngine being the two top contenders). One of the things that’s been keeping me from exploring that is a distinct lack of redirect-fu when it comes to making sure I don’t break my old permalinks. I’ve received one offer of possible assistance with that, though, so it may be less of a hassle than it’s looked in the past. In the best of all possible worlds I’d be able to keep my current permalink scheme, but I’m not sure if that’s possible with the other systems, so if I have to, I’d settle for working redirects.
Part of what keeps me on Movable Type, though, is simple customer loyalty and experience. I’ve been on MT/TypePad for years now, and it’s what I’m most familiar with. Plus, they’ve been very good to me — they even just refunded me the $120 I’d accidentally paid for a year of TypePad that I wouldn’t be using, purely out of the goodness of their heart (I didn’t even ask — they saw my post grumbling about my own absentmindedness and made the offer).
I’m also unsure about how much moving to a PHP-based system (as both WP and EE are) would impact my server. MT’s Perl codebase has high overhead when it’s working on something, but then very low overhead when it’s simply serving static pages. Thanks to that, until the spam attacks started getting this bad, it played very nicely on my system. Since PHP has to process every page as it goes out, that’s more overall processing, and the question becomes whether PHP is resource-friendly enough on my box to be worth the switch. I’d used MT’s new PHP integration to dynamically generate pages for a while (before I decided that I wanted to integrate plugins that didn’t play nicely with the PHP code), and there was a noticeable lag when first requesting a page. More info on this aspect from any current WP or EE users (or even developers) would certainly be appreciated.
No matter what, though, I’m not going to be up and disappearing. I’m frustrated and annoyed by the whole situation (though not as much as I was yesterday), sure…but I’m not that easy to shut up, either. ;)
Oh, one other thing: if I do move to another system, I want to be able to use tags instead of categories. I know that there’s a plugin for this for Expression Engine (John‘s using it), and it appears that there is a hack for WordPress also (though that’s from a few months ago). Something else for me to investigate while I’m deciding which direction to head.
Update: I’ve had one vote against going to a dynamic system such as WP or EE. Phil (who I host) has both a WP and an MT weblog set up on my server. To compare the two, click these links and compare how long they take to load: MT (serving static pages) and WP (serving dynamic pages). It’s a noticeable difference, the MT site pops right up, while you can watch the WP site build the page. Off of that example, at least, I’m thinking sticking with MT and static pages is a good idea.
Update: Whee — I’m still getting comments, they’re just “old-school” e-mail comments. :) This is good. Both indieb0i and Ryan (and Gregor) have let me know about the Staticize plugin for WordPress, which “is a highly advanced caching engine that dynamically and automatically caches pages on your site that need to be cached, when they need to be cached.” Essentially, only the parts of the page that really need to be dynamically generated are, and the rest of the page is static (at least, that’s how I’m reading it). Nice, and puts WP back in the possibilities list. Thanks!