I’m writing this post in Google Chrome. Google’s beta release of the Google Web Browser. It took me some time to download and install Chrome because the download site is obviously swamped mere hours/minutes past it’s “exciting” launch.

First impressions? Very clean and simple. The Chrome is almost not there.
And it’s fast. It renders pages very fast. Very fast. Faster than anything I’ve used before. Wordpress is running nicely, the embedded Gears and the Javascript optimisations probably have a huge benefit for Wordpress sites due to the heavy use of Javascript techniques used in it. And Gmail? Scorching performance.

So far, the performance is the killer USP.

No rendering issues on any sites I’ve tried so far.

The big drawback? Lack of features. I guess it took Firefox quite some time to get to the point that I have my perfect profile, with use of firebug, HTML validator etc. But it is so simple and clean. To quote page 24 of the comic (which I can’t find a good way to deeplink, so won’t):

We don’t want to interrupt anything the user is trying to do. If you can just ignore the browser we’ve done a good job. 

 
They have done a good job. The browser is not there, in a way that Firefox and IE7 sadly are.

The question for me earlier today was Why? Dare says it’s because they want to drive the web forward, which is backed up by their comic and what they say on their blogs and posts and brochure pages. They live and die by the web. They are producing some of the best, or most influential at least, web based applications. And their ability to develop these and move them forward is stifled by the pace of browser development in IE, Firefox and other products.

The pages in the comic complaining about “Speed Limits” on the web etc seem to back this up. For them, the claimed point of Chrome is to show people what a fresh look at the web could be. Faster. More powerful. Safer. Better. More driven by the Google Ethos and approach to building great, inovative products that push the industry forward in big jumps.

Of course, not everyone buys into this. Microsoft Watch see it as a cynical thing. Killing their partners.  Some kind of anti-trust, Google doing evil, making the wrong move for a fair market etc.

I don’t think I buy into that.

Earlier today, my thoughts ran on the lines of, this is a bad idea and it won’t work. According to Google’s figures, 40% of their users are on IE6, 40% on IE7 and 16% on firefox. Talking to colleagues at work, who are all internet developers. Geeks. The people who live on the web as much as Google, a lot of them use IE because it’s on their PC and it works. They don’t want or need anything more. That 16% Firefox figure comes from Firefox being the best thing on Linux. From Firefox being the best non-Microsoft solution (for the religious out there). And being pretty damn good for customisation. But, I would hazard the opinion that the market is not 100%. There is a significant portion of that market that is not, and never will be, up for grabs.

It’s my family, they’ll only use what’s on their desktop. They don’t know or care why firefox might be better for me to use. It’s not going to change them using IE because it’s there. Microsoft’s bundling of IE was clearly anit-competitive black had because of this. And the number of corporate environments with lock downs that allow the net, or their intranet, but only via IE as it’s part of their OS and can be locked down as such.

So, that makes Firefoxes market share bigger. So Chrome is competing with maybe the 16% Firefox marketshare, and 10% of the IE share that hasn’t moved but could. And the niche things.

So, is Chrome really about forcing inovation? It’ll force it in that niche away from IE, and Microsoft might pull along. But only if it’s really good. I didn’t beleive I’d use it for more than 10 minutes. Now, having used it for a little while, I plan to install it at work too. And live with it for a while. It’s that good. In beta 1. With very few features.

And it’s so fast. Firefox 3 was a lot faster than Firefox 2. If Chrome had come out before FF3, I may never have installed FF3. Because it’s so fast. CLEARLY faster than FF3. Which when I first switched to from FF2 felt so much faster. And when I went back to FF2 on an older machine I hadn’t upgraded it was painful. Will I hurt in Firefox3 at work in the morning?

So Firefox needs to start worying. It needs to look at V8. It needs to pull some of this stuff in and catch up.

Chrome could get a good fast uptake and make a very significant dint into that 16%.

And it doesn’t have adBlock.

Ah, now I’m suspicious. Of that 16% marketshare that firefox has, how many users do you think have adBlock or GreaseMonkey or another script that takes that crap off the web? That removes Googles Ad revenue stream? I’ve not seen an advert on the internet since I switched to Firefox with early versions of adBlock. And I use the web a lot. And I know that most Firefox users have something like adBlock running.

So is it about revenue? Chrome is Open. I assume it will have/does have plugin support. Will adBlock for Chrome come? Or will Google keep that out of it’s ecosystem? Is Chrome about revenue? Switch people to Chrome, remove adblock, get the chance to show people more ads. In return for faster, safer browsing with richer applications.

(I’ve just noticed my CPU pegged at about 30% on task manager. I’ve checked the task manager in Chrome. Shockwave was eating CPU. I’ve killed the tabs with Shockwave in, and now the browser is a ghost in my system eating no resources at all. Neat.)

But, Chrome is about inovation we’re told. Yet doesn’t support XUL, Mozilla’s XHTML + Rich GUI markup language. That is something I thought would be a great thing to see grow. That could give the real edge to these rich applications that Google want Chrome to enable. I assume it’s lacking due to the use of webkit. But, with v8 powered XUL, the things you could build would be awesome.

It’s going to be a case of time will tell I assume. I think it looks positive. This morning when I heard the news, I couldn’t see the point. The competition (Firefox, Safari and Opera) are too far ahead. Google too far behind. Now I’ve used the “vision”, the speed, cleanliness and disruptive new thinking are converting me.

Chrome + Gears + Google’s web applications could be a massive boost in creativity, development and forward motion that the web as an operating system/platform for the future of computing really needs.

Popularity: 53% [?]

The Geeklog Project (for which I am a Core Team Member) has been confirmed as a participating organisation in the Google Summer of Code 2008. We have our ideas list up and are recruiting for students.

So, if you are a student at university and interested in a Free Google T-Shirt and Some Money for contributing to a PHP Open Source Project, then check it out. I’ve identified three projects that I will be mentoring on if suitable students are found, and there are a number of other projects available if you hate me

Popularity: 50% [?]

In the last 38 days there have been two urgent security fix releases of Wordpress. In the last 3 and a tiny bit months there have been three maintenance releases of Wordpress. In the last 4 and a tiny bit months there have been four releases of Wordpress.

Other than the fact I’m starting to get pretty worried about the security and stability of the software in general, it’s a pain in the rear to have to keep upgrading. So I’m making it easier for me. Wordpress themselves have helped by having a decent system in place for making it easy to get the latest.

I now have the simplest of shell scripts which:

1. Backs up my database.
2. Backs up my Wordpress folder.
3. Gets the latest Wordpress release.
4. Unpacks that release.
5. Deploys that release live.

Being nice, I’m going to share it with you:

mysqldump --host=localhost --user=wordpress --password=wordpress wordpress > wordpress.sql
tar -zcf wordpress_backup.tgz wordpress_live
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xzf latest.tar.gz
cp -r wordpress/* wordpress_live/
rm -r wordpress


Of course this assumes that you have a wordpress database in a localhost MySQL instance with username and password wordpress and that your live wordpress folder is wordpress_live so you can cope with a temporary wordpress folder from the unpack. It also assumes that mysqldump, tar and wget are available in your shell.

Also, I don’t just do this on live. I back up my live, put it on my portable instance and test the new version first. Then I do it on live. Then I update the versions of my plugins.

What an arse. This is why I prefer Geeklog. It’s more secure and doesn’t change at an alarming rate.

Now I can SSH into my server and type ./upgradewordpress.sh when I’m ready then hit http://inanger.com/[secretlocationofadmin]/wp-upgrade.php and finish things off. Job done. I still have a pain in the rear as I have to test the release locally first (./upgradewordpress.sh on local instance of course, after restoring a fresh backup of live into it and adjusting the config to refer to my local instance).

And I think this is less risky than tracking Wordpress via SVN on live.

Popularity: 55% [?]

The Zend Framework provides an interesting set of PHP5 libraries for caching. There’s a nice architecture to it, providing a number of different backends and frontends for caching. However, I recently found it very frustrating to try and figure out a decent caching strategy for the new version of a site I was working on.

And the documentation did not help at all. So, allow me to elaborate for the benefit of the huddled masses.

The introduction in the caching section of the manual gives a decent enough overview of the basics, if I want to cache a page with a nice simple ID, such as “Page1″ with a set lifetime I can do so in a few lines of code.

However, another page goes on to mention how you can also “tag” records with multiple tags. Another page talks about how to clear the cache by a single tag, or combination of tags.

But nothing explains the relationships between tags and ids, and how the clear works with tags or ids.

Now, I’m working on a system which has two views of a music catalogue for a radio station. There is the requests system and there is the discography system. They both present differing views of the same data. The request system filters the list of artists, albums and tracks on the station to those that can be requested and displays a “request optimised” set of screens with some of the data. The discography section shows everything about an artist, all their albums, all tracks, reviews and so forth, without the cruft needed for the request sub-system.

We cache these screens for obvious reasons. What we need is the ability to clear the cache of an artist, album or track possibly within the requests or the discography, or both. So, I figured on a system of unique keys like artist_123 and album_123 etc then to use the tags to “lump” things together. So album_123 would have the artist_123 tag in both discography and request view plus the discography tag in the discography and the requests tag in the requests view. Something like:

$cache->load("album_123", array("album_123", "artist_123", "requests", "en_GB", "album");

I could then simply invalidate the cache of all albums, request pages, artist_123 pages or British English generated pages or any combination of those items

This does not work.

The first important thing is that the ID is the unique key. Not the combination of the ID and the tag(s). So if you save page1 to the cache with the tags tag1 and tag2, then try and load page1 from the cache with tags tag3 and tag4, you’ll get the result of saving with tag1 and tag2!

Insane, but true. Try it. The tag has no effect whatsoever it seems on the load code. If it can find an item by ID, then it loads it, irrespective of tags. I’m not sure if this is behaviour by design, or a bug on my system using the file backend, but it is consistent. I just think it’s mad.

To get what I desire, I’m going to have to cache with:

$cache->load("requests_artist_123_album_123_en_GB", array("requests", "artist_123", "album_123", "en_GB", "albums");

Then I can still do a clear on the appropriate tags, if for example I want to remove all albums from the requests cache:

$cache->clean(Zend_Cache::CLEANING_MODE_MATCHING_TAG, (array("requests","albums"));

It’s a bit of a pain in the rear, but, once you’ve figured out the $tags argument on the load method is pointless, it’s fine.

Of course, figuring all this out was further compicated by the fact that the examples in the manual often use load() with $key and $tags and save() with no arguments. I assumed therefore that the point of the $tags argument on load() was to set the tags that would be used auto-magically on save(). Only, if you don’t pass $tags to save() it saves with no tags. Which is also silly, since it does respect the $key used in the load() method.

Popularity: 41% [?]

I’m often faced with the need to do a one off crunch of data to provide answers to questions management ask about raw data. Not the kind of thing they’ll be asking for on a regular basis. Just a need to scratch an individual itch. One off reports on specific aspects of code metrics. Calculate some predictions of data growth in the application across different aspects of it’s user base.

On these occasions, I either turn to Query Analyser to mine our SQL Server databases directly, or use the data import tool in Excel and try and crunch the data swiftly in that. Sometimes, those needs become a long running need to manage some data, where Excel is often the preferred format, because I can do some initial crunching and manage the data in there and the rest of management can then take a copy and further manipulate it and play with it to get additional information as and when it occurs to them they need it.

The problem I face is that Excel is designed for accountants and management types with no programming knowledge to manage spreadsheets of data they understand. It’s too damn user friendly. I find it very hard sometimes to find a good way to manage my data in Excel. I often throw my hands up in dispaire and lash up a software tool specifically to manage the data. I’m talking about a full on database driven web application in most cases. It’s so much faster for me to work with the data that way, and I can then use the Data Import tool in Excel to shove the data in raw forms into spreadsheets if the people asking for the data want to take it away and play with it.

There has to be a better way. There has to be a more productive way for me to do this. A more developer focussed tool for doing this, that allows you to achieve with scripting/programming what you would achieve in Excel by mucking around with excessively user friendly wizards and obscure dialogue screens.

John Udell thinks the answer might look something like Resolver, which is a new spreadsheet application written in Python that allows you to use Python directly in cells and to have full access to .NET and IronPython through the whole application.

This just seems to be the wrong solution to me. With Excel we have a spreadsheet product that is so good it’s destroyed all competition that non-programmers use and love. It can be extended by programmers with add-ins and macros. You can write .NET code or VBA code (easy for non-programmers to learn) in the Macros etc. However, the formulae are restricted to the old style “icky” functions. Stick=if(condition,forumlae,formulae) in, which just makes programmers recoil from the keyboard in horror.

The right answer to the question is to have a simple option to enable direct access to the .NET runtime in cells. Then people can code formulae in any .NET enabled language they choose, including IronPython.

Do not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Popularity: 31% [?]

In response to my emails to the Zend Framework I18N list and my previous post, Thomas, the author of the Zend_Translate framework items mailed back to the list here:

> 2) gettext is a more expensive version of using the arrays backend.

No… it’s a less expensive version. What takes time is reading the original
source. Your processor is always faster than your harddrive.
It is better to do some computations than reading a bigger file. And mo
files are much smaller than the same sized array files.

This still seems wrong to me, so I’ve done a bit more analysis. I have now got XDebug up and running in my portable environment, so I can really see the details of the costs. Now, to caveat all this, I’m running all this from a USB key on a laptop that’s doing a number of other background tasks, so, the performance is not isolated. Due to this I’ll be looking at percentages of time in Wincachegrind, not actual execution times.

Now, to test this I have generated two files. One of which is a .po containing 1000 phrases which I have compiled to a .mo file. The other is a PHP array in a PHP file containing the same 1000 translations. I generated this with a script, the translations are a bit simple:

From the .po file:

msgid “String 0″
msgstr “String Translated 0″

From the .php file:

‘String 0′=> ‘String Translated 0′,

I have then written a simple PHP file which translates 50 of these items. A reasonable enough test I think. Firstly, to test the translation using the fast Zend_Translate gettext options:

require_once 'Zend/Translate.php';
i = new Zend_Translate('gettext', '/development/language/test.en.mo', 'en');
 
function _($s)
{
    global $i;
    $s = $i->_($s);
    echo($s."<br/>\n");
}
 
_('String 1');
_('String 2');
...

I then ran this file and loaded the cachegrind output into WinCacheGrind. 87.88% of the execution time was spent in Zend_Translate_Adapter_Gettext->_loadTranslationData. Performing translations took 1.99% of the time.

Next I used my PHP array and the Zend_Translate array backend:

require_once 'Zend/Translate.php';
require_once '/development/language/test.en.php';
$i = new Zend_Translate('array', $LANGUAGE, en);

(The rest of the file remains the same). I then ran this and checked the output. loadTranslationData took 78.36% of the time. Performing translations took 2.86% of the time.

My third test was just to use the test.en.php file and a simple translation function:

require_once '/development/language/test.en.php';
function _($s) {
  global $LANGUAGE;
   $s = (array_key_exists($s, $LANGUAGE)) ? $LANGUAGE[$s] : $s;
  return $s;
}

The first thing to note was that the Zend_Translate items took over 20ms each. This one not using Zend at all took 2.8ms. The require_once statement took 1.83% of that time. Then it was just repetition of an un-recordably-fast translation 50 times.

So what do I draw from this? I draw from this that for simple translations, you can’t beat a very, very simple system with just an array of translations. I haven’t looked in any depth at the other services offered by Zend_Translate, but it does allow you to add multiple translations and translate in multiple languages. But, do you have a use-case for that?

If your UI needs to display in a single language, but translate that language, take the simple approach. It needs a little extension to support modular languages, but look at the PHPBB3 implementation and you can’t go far wrong. That loads modular translation files (just to keep that trivial require_once cost down) each of which array_merge’s back into a single translation array which is key’d by constants.

Fast.

My cachegrind files for your reading pleasure:
Zend_Translate - Array
Zend_Translate - Gettext
Non-Zend_Translate

Popularity: 37% [?]

The web is global.

Lots of websites do not cope with this. They do not provide a user setting for the language and deliver their content in that language.

Clearly, this is bad. If you are producing an application, like Multiblog, then you need to make it international. It needs the UI at least (content is a more thorny issue) to work in the users preferred language. Otherwise they will experience friction trying to use the confusing foreign thing.

There are a lot of ways to achieve this. Geeklog and PHPBB3 use arrays to translate content and allow the user to pick things. Drupal uses the GNU GetText system. And there are other approaches.

Choosing the right approach and using it correctly is difficult. I’m currently experimenting with approaches for Multiblog and other projects. I’m currently looking into the very interesting Zend Framework’s Zend_Translate class. This allows a number of different approaches, including both Array and GetText.

GetText appears to be the recommended choice. There are a number of free tools that can generate your translation files, as the translation files are not human readable. It’s fast and threadsafe. The Zend Framework Manual offers some advice on how to structure your translation files. There are several suggested methods, but, there is no suggestion of how to structure your translation modules.

The question I asked was “What’s the best practice?”, and no-one seems to know, so I guess I need to figure it out for myself from basic principles.

Now, GetText was written to provide internationalisation for the GNU software. Including the core of the Linux OS. Here, the GetText file is (I assume) parsed once at start up and held in memory to translate as things go. Web applications are different. Every page view is essentially a new start up. That GetText translation source is going to be loaded hundreds and thousands of times. Not just once on boot of the web server.

So, if we want to get this right, we need to know what our best bet is. Do we want a monolithic all translations file, or do we want to modularise this file and load it as needed? Does it use the file like a database and seek things out, or does it parse the whole thing every time and process it internally?

I’ve done some simple testing. I produced a basic test catalogue with poEdit and compiled a mo file from it:

msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: Test Zend GetTextn"
"POT-Creation-Date: n"
"PO-Revision-Date: 2007-06-21 12:20-0000n"
"Last-Translator: THEMike n"
"Language-Team: n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bitn"
"X-Poedit-Language: Englishn"
"X-Poedit-Country: UNITED KINGDOMn"
"X-Poedit-SourceCharset: utf-8n"

msgid "This is a test."
msgstr "[Translated]This is a test.[/Translated]"

I then wrote a simple test harness PHP file which loads a Zend_Translate using gettext and translates a single line. Before performing a translation, I var_dump the Zend_Translate instance to see what’s in it:

  <?php
  /* Configuration: */
  define('PATH_TO_ENGINE', '/development/engine/');
  define('PATH_TO_LANGUAGE', '/development/language/');/* Put engine on the include path */
$curPHPIncludePath = ini_get( 'include_path' );
if (defined( 'PATH_SEPARATOR')) {
    $separator = PATH_SEPARATOR;
} else {
    // prior to PHP 4.3.0, we have to guess the correct separator ...
    $separator = ';';
    if( strpos( $curPHPIncludePath, $separator ) === false ) {
        $separator = ':';
    }
}
if (ini_set('include_path', PATH_TO_ENGINE . $separator . $curPHPIncludePath) === false){
        die('Buggered');
}
require_once 'Zend/Translate.php';
$t = new Zend_Translate('gettext', PATH_TO_LANGUAGE.'test.en.mo', 'en');
echo('<pre>');var_dump($t);echo("</pre><hr/>n");echo($t->_('This is a test.'));?>

The result of the var_dump being:

object(Zend_Translate)#1 (1) {
  ["_adapter:private"]=>
  object(Zend_Translate_Adapter_Gettext)#2 (6) {
    ["_bigEndian:private"]=>
    bool(false)
    ["_file:private"]=>
    resource(21) of type (stream)
    ["_locale:protected"]=>
    string(2) "en"
    ["_languages:protected"]=>
    array(1) {
      ["en"]=>
      string(2) "en"
    }
    ["_options:protected"]=>
    array(1) {
      ["clear"]=>
      bool(false)
   }
    ["_translate:protected"]=>
    array(1) {
      ["en"]=>
      array(2) {
        [""]=>
        string(339) "Project-Id-Version: Test Zend GetText
POT-Creation-Date:
PO-Revision-Date: 2007-06-21 12:20-0000
Last-Translator: THEMike
Language-Team:
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Poedit-Language: English
X-Poedit-Country: UNITED KINGDOM
X-Poedit-SourceCharset: utf-8
"
        ["This is a test."]=>
        string(40) "[Translated]This is a test.[/Translated]"
      }
    }
  }
}

As you can see, before I’ve even called a translate call, the entire mo translation catalogue has been loaded into memory and parsed internally to form a PHP array. Which is then used for translation.

Clearly, this indicates a very modular translation system. I would want a core.lang.mo file for “common” translations used througout the application and then a controller.lang.mo file for each controller that had that controller’s specific phrases in it which is only loaded by that controller.

However, note that the translation is done to a PHP array. Essentially, it seems the gettext translator is really a front-end loader of the array translator. So why not use the array translator?

The only downside I can see is that it’s harder to get non-programmers to generate valid PHP arrays when supplying your translation. Other than that, anything that the PHP extension does to optimise compilation and processing of PHP code will kick in and give you a significantly improved performance. Put extra things on top of that like the Zend Optimisers and so forth, and you have a compelling reason to use highly modular array based translation.

The problem then remains getting valid PHP array files back from your translators, and frankly, that can be solved by writing a simple front end for your translators so they have a GUI to use.

Popularity: 48% [?]

This morning I was reading a post by Jeff Atwood about Mike Gunderloy switching away from Microsoft. Jeff says:

Still, his [Mike Grunderloy's] attitude frustrates me, because it falls so egregiously into the stereotypical, religious love/hate dichotomy that I’ve observed again and again in software developers. You either love Microsoft and use exclusively Microsoft products, or you hate Microsoft, and you vow never to use any of their products ever again. There’s nothing in between. No middle ground.

This is something I too see all the time. People take their choice of development platform incredibly seriously. Personally, I’ve not seen too much positive Microsoft love, in my life I’ve been more exposed people with a blind and all consuming love elsewhere. More specifically, I’ve been exposed to Java Zealot’s who will not, under any circumstances, accept that anything other than Java is the solution to their problem. I’ve been exposed to Java developers who are Microsoft haters, and Microsoft haters who are not Java developers also. But overridingly, the zeolotry I’ve seen has been for Java.

My professional work has had a predominately Microsoft bias. I’ve ended up for whatever reason falling into teams using Microsoft tools and products to build solutions. My non-professional work on the other hand has had the opposite bias. I’ve tended towards Open Source languages and tools such as PHP and other scripting languages. I’ve used Delphi heavily. And when I have been using Microsoft languages (mostly scripting), I’ve been using non-Microsoft products to write the code (namely Ultraedit).

I’ve even written Java.

I’ve found this to be a huge advantage to me in my career.

Each language I learn, each tool I use, comes with further knowledge and appreciation of the art of programming. Each new language that appears is designed to solve a perceived problem with a pre-existing language, and so comes with a new development ethos.

As language and platform are a religion for so many developers, the communities round these platforms become isolated and insular. There is little cross-pollination of ideas and techniques between these communities. In biological terms, this limits the evolution and growth of development. It’s gene pool is kept artificially shallow.

I’m driven by a deep interest in programming. I love to pick up new tools and new ideas. I find that every time I learn a new language, I find new approaches to common problems, that could work in a number of other languages that I am fluent in. And then I try and take these ideas and use them outside of their spawning ground.

Looking at some of the endorsements I’ve had provided on my LinkedIn profile from ex-colleagues, it’s not just my perception that this has been good for me. Other people have seen the benefits I’ve given previous companies from this breadth of knowledge. I can think outside the box in any language, because I know so many languages. For example, this quote was from one of the senior technical architects in the Java division of my company, a division that I only directly worked with once however, provided input to many times:

“Mike is a very skilled and highly professional developer. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Mike’s work is the sheer number of languages and technologies Mike knows to a professional standard - no doubt a consequence of Mike’s eagerness to take on, and complete, new challenges which others may shy away from. Mike’s breadth of knowledge makes him a great asset to have around as he is very approachable and will find time to share his expertise with his colleagues.”

As Jeff says:

As a software developer, you’re doing yourself a disservice by pledging allegiance to anything other than yourself and your craft– whether it’s Microsoft or the principle of free software. Stop with the us vs. them mentality. Let go of the partisanship. We’re all in this thing together.

I’m a pragmatist. For now, I choose to live in the Microsoft universe. But that doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of how the other half lives. There’s always more than one way to do it, and just because I chose one particular way doesn’t make it the right way– or even a particularly good way. Choosing to be provincial and insular is a sure-fire path to ignorance. Learn how the other half lives. Get to know some developers who don’t live in the exact same world you do. Find out what tools they’re using, and why.

It is your duty to yourself, your company, your colleagues and most of all your career to keep your eyes on the alternatives. Don’t start to feel safe that you’ve made the best choice. Pick up other languages as they become of interest, use them in anger, understand why the Ruby way of doing something is different to the Java way, the .NET way and the Visual Basic way. Take that knowledge, absorb it, and re-use it in other languages, on other projects.

Unless you are happy to be a day coder, you need to do this. If you are serious about being a real programmer, and being all that you can be as a developer. You must have breadth. You must get away from the us-and-them, the religion, the I’ve chosen the right tool, yours sucks attitude.

You must understand programming as an art, not just the particular paintbrush that was shoved in your hand. If you don’t have the time or the passion to pick up and code in other languages, at least read blogs about them. Follow the design and issues that surround using that language. Keep yourself open to the new ideas.

It will make a huge difference

Popularity: 21% [?]

So, today I’ve finally finished installing and configuring a Wordpress installation for running InAnger.com. This may seem a fairly odd decision to certain people who know certain things. The main reason it’s odd is that I am a member of the core development team for the Geeklog system. Wordpress is a PHP application using a MySQL database for running a Blog. So is Geeklog. So then, if I am a Geeklog developer, why have I chosen a competing system to run my new site? Interesting question, and one I shall discuss in length.

Firstly, I consider it important to investigate the innovation going on in competing products. I take a similar approach with software languages and tools. Something else is out there and has some buzz, so I play with it to find out why it has that buzz and what that new thing can do for me. With software languages and tools this is likely to be a switch to develop with a new language, even if it’s just for certain tasks that that language is particularly handy for. With a piece of software like a Media Player it’s a possible full switch to that product if it’s better.

With a CMS however, it’s more likely to be that I experiment with it and frankly steal the neat features and implement them in Geeklog. So, I’ve often seen posts “I tried geeklog, but now I’ve switched to wordpress and like it more”. Time to find out why and see if I can address those issues.

That’s not all though. I’m a terrible one for tinkering. I can’t find-out that some piece of software I use is customisable or configurable without becoming dissatisfied with what it can do, and try and customise it. As a Geeklog core developer, if I was using Geeklog, I’d get constantly side-tracked customising things and re-writing things. With Wordpress being a stable application with an active development community which I am not a member of I’m more likely to be able to keep my hands off, and concentrate on using the application.

So, Wordpress vs Geeklog, what’s the difference?

Wordpress

Wordpress is a highly popular Open Source blogging tool. It’s focussed on “aesthetics, web standards and usability”. It has a simple elegant usable interface.

Geeklog

Geeklog is also an Open Source blogging tool. It’s focussed on security. Out of the box it provides a full portal implementation as well as the core blogging features.

Installation

Installation of both is reasonably simple. In both cases you download a tarball archive of the latest version. In both cases you extract this and create an empty MySQL database to install into (in Geeklog’s case, you may use a Microsoft SQL Server database too). In both cases you set up database connection information in a configuration file. In the case of Geeklog all your site’s basic configuration is also in the configuration file and may be edited at the same time, plus, there is the additional need to configure file paths in two files (the configuration file and lib-common.php, the core functionality file). In Wordpress’ case you have to copy the config file to a new name.

Then you navigate to the install script location for either system and execute the install process. Voila, two complete blog package installs. You’re then left to configure up your system to meet your needs.

Publishing Blog Entries

The main thing you’re going to be concerned with day to day with your blog engine is writing, editing, posting and maintaining entries.

Both Geeklog and Wordpress have similar options for your posts. Advanced HTML editors (though I feel the use of FCKEditor gives Geeklog the edge here), control over the way the link is generated (post slug in Wordpress and Story ID in Geeklog, they form part of the URL for Search Engine Friendly URLs), control over user feedback permitted (comments etc), the ability to place an article into a category (and here Wordpress wins with multiple category support), image upload etc.
So where are the differences? Well, Wordpress allows Custom Fields on stories. I have yet to fully explore these, but they allow plugins to provide rich functionality easily to stories. Geeklog has Autotags which replace this functionality.

Geeklog has a strong security model, you can have many user groups and can set permissions for stories and topics in a very controlled fashion. Wordpress lacks any of this subtle security, it’s focussed on public blogging.

Geeklog also has the ability to auto-archive stories after a certain amount of time.

Really at the story level, the only differentiation seems to be that Geeklog has an excellent security system and also allows users to contribute stories (via moderation if necessary) to the site.

Both have strong API’s for plugins to extend things, however, I think extending the posting engine in Wordpress is a lot easier than in Geeklog.

So what about at the display end of stories? Both support comments, trackbacks and pingbacks with anti-spam measures and control over who can comment etc. Both have ways the display of a story can be tailored to suit the webmaster’s needs. It’s pretty even , with minor differences.

That leaves the user experience. Geeklog is (out of the box) a richer and more complex application than Wordpress. It does more. And thus, it’s a bit harder to learn your way around at first. That doesn’t mean Wordpress is a saint. I think I found my way round it reasonably quickly, from scratch, but, it could have been a clearer process. That said, Wordpress’ documentation which is linked at the foot of every admin screen is rich and detailed and vastly superior to the limited (by comparison) documentation for Geeklog.

Other Features

Wordpress is a blogging engine. That’s about it. It gives you static pages and links. But out of the box, that’s pretty much your lot. Geeklog is more of a portal, it comes with a calendar (for events, not to be confused with a monthly post view calendar which both systems have), polls system, links directory and static pages. Geeklog has a modular system for blocks on both the left and right hand side of the page, which allows the administrator to configure up static text, import RSS feeds, or use various built in functions to produce various types of dynamic boxes. To do this in Wordpress, you must edit the theme to include the HTML and/or function calls.

Themeing/Skinning

Both Geeklog and Wordpress come with perfectly nice default themes. But you don’t want your site to look like Just Another Geeklog/Wordpress Site. You want it to look individual and have an identity of it’s own. Both systems therefore offer a theming system to change the look and feel of your site.

Wordpress has a small number of PHP files that make up the base theme. These contain PHP function calls to output data and even loop structures to iterate over posts. This is quite confusing for non-programmers to get to grips with, but there is a lot of documentation, many community developed themes and lots of community support for this work. Plus, there aren’t that many files to edit.

Geeklog has many THTML files that make up the base theme. These contain HTML and place holders for dynamic data (in curly braces, for example {story_title}). It takes a fair bit of work to get your head around how these files are used to actually construct the layout of your site, and the documentation isn’t fantastic on these. But, I feel the content of each template is less confusing.

Extending

Both systems support plugins to provide the functionality you want. Some of Geeklog’s out of the box functionality is from core plugins (calendar, links, polls) and can be uninstalled if you do not like it.

The Geeklog API consists of a lot of functions you can define that get called at appropriate points. The Wordpress API consists of a lot of places you can tell Wordpress that your plugin wants a function call inserting into the chain. Both API’s seem to be pretty mature and well thought out and provide a really great way of extending the application.

If anything, I would suggest the opinion that Geeklog’s API is more mature and powerful, implementations include various image galleries (including integrations of popular Open Source gallery applications like Gallery), forums, file repositories and even further anti-spam measures. Wordpress however seems to have many more plugins available, more focussed on adding features to the story engine.

Summary

So, to just recap. Geeklog is a bigger system. It does a lot more. But, for people who just want to set up a simple blog, that might be too much, too daunting, too confusing. They’re targeted at different audiences. Geeklog is for running sites that are more than just a blog. Wordpress is for sites that are just a blog. The reason people are switching, is because all that power and all those features get in the way of having a plain, simple blog that everyone can read.

Popularity: 69% [?]