#FF00AA

I had a look at the code (the advantage of webmastering many different blogs is getting a hand at many different CMSs) before I posted a comment there and, yes, it’s just as I thought: if I’m not mistaken (I didn’t go through every included file), WordPress and DotClear do send a SQL query every time an aggregator requests the RSS. Which means, once or twice per hour and per regular reader. It kills me.

“Yeah, but it’s open source, so it has to be better than Movable Type, it’s just statutory.” Right. But wrong. When I install Movable Type I don’t have to think about how I’ll hack the administration pages to make them generate static pages when content has changed.

Meanwhile, I’m sweating blood over reprogramming Gayattitude to spare the SQL server and make as much of it into static pages as I can (even if that means losing those visitors who can’t use cookies). One of these days I’m just gonna migrate all the blogs on this server to Movable Type.

P.S. Before people call me a freerider and tell me I should just shut up and either contribute or not use it: I’m not criticizing the fact that a free, open source piece of software, which I use, is incomplete. I’m criticizaing, as a (genial, of course) programmer, the fact that (non-genial, obviously) colleagues could upload blog systems that, each time a reader access the RSS URL, trigger a host of includes and a big SQL query, even though its contents only change a few times a day at most, when the blogger posts (I’ll be more lenient about the home page, as it changes much more frequently if comments are activated, and it can also need to contain PHP for other uses). It kills me, not as a software user, but as an engineer.