Stardate 20011211.1035 (On Screen): Noah did a very fine job on Greymatter, it must be said. But it was never really intended for heavy duty sites like Kevin's or my own, and when the number of entries it is managing approaches 2000, it begins to suffer rather badly. Right now, for example, a site search here takes upwards of half a minute, and a "rebuild all" can take ten minutes -- and that's with only 6 months of material. What's it going to be like a year from now? It is a problem. Kevin is starting to look into
Movable Type. Me, I downloaded the demo version of
CityDesk yesterday and I'm starting to play with that. The biggest problem is getting it to make its output look something like what I have now. I fear I may have to learn how CSS works.
For me, one of the advantages of CityDesk is that it does the majority of its work on my desktop computer, which is vastly faster and more powerful than the one in the server (where Greymatter or Movable Type would run). After all, a 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird is going to run rings around a 300 MHz K6-2. And CityDesk is running compiled code instead of dog-slow interpretive PERL. It also uses a database to maintain its entries instead of the huge swarm of individual files that Greymatter uses. Another advantage over Greymatter is that it is WYSIWYG. It's also commercial, but I don't have a problem with buying my tools. After all, I bought UBBS for $250. I also voluntarily gave money to Noah for Greymatter. So I don't have any problem with giving Joel cash for his hard work, if what he made is useful to me. I'm sure that it's possible to run a web log with CityDesk because Joel himself is doing so now. (discuss)
