The joy of dynamic templates

So perhaps it doesn't take much to give me a thrill, but now that I've finally fully upgraded Cronaca's Movable Type installation, I just have to tell the world how much faster everything runs with dynamically generated archive pages (all the individual permalinked posts, that is). Posting, editing, and commenting alike -- it's like switching from dialup to broadband. And when it comes to rebuilding (including despamming), raise that to the next power.

Here are some links that were helpful to me. To the various authors, my heartfelt thanks:
How it works and won't mess up your external links; 9 steps to a quicker installation; Dave's blog, with followup; .htaccess tips; and last but far from least, Migrate Your MT 2.x Blog To Movable Type 3 (essential reading for those of us with lots of legacy code).

ADDENDUM: Though MT-Blacklist 1.6.5 supposedly doesn't work with MT 3.x, to all appearances it kept blocking comment spam during the short time between upgrading Cronaca from MT 2.661 to 3.121 and installation of MT-Blacklist 2.01b. I still ended up having to clear out a bunch of spam, however, since I initially relied on the default blacklist rather than importing my old one. Nonetheless, since it was all on older posts, it was put into a queue for moderation and never appeared on the public site.

An unexpected consequence of doing away with comment pop-ups in favor of inline entries: a significant increase in bandwidth consumption. Logs show a sudden doubling (more or less) of pageviews per visit, and though I'd love to be better read, self-delusion has its limits. At least Cronaca is a pretty bare-bones site, so the increased bandwidth will add at most a few bucks a month to hosting charges.

CORRECTION: Upon further study of traffic reports, the increased bandwidth usage doesn't appear to have anything to do with the upgrade. Instead, it appears to be a real surge in traffic due to a couple of prominent links, but a surge that for some reason registered only in terms of page views and not number of visitors. Will have to check how AWStats registers links from sites like MSN (which also was recorded as a link from a search engine, rather than from another site).

UPDATE: Our recent bandwidth usage spike was due to Avantgo users, directed by a link on MSNBC. Avantgo appears to be rather ill-behaved, not just in downloading whole sites, but in not caching content so that the massive downloads occur repeatedly, even though the pages downloaded haven't changed. Note that others have had similar problems with badly configured RSS aggregators.

Finally, something important for those who opt for dynamically generated individual entries along with the caching option: while the dynamic option frees you from the need to rebuild, using the cache option means you may have to manually delete the cached (old) version of any entry where you delete a comment. This only applies to comments that have made it through any filtering and have already appeared on your public site.

Posted by David on November 22, 2004 8:02 PM