A short analysis comparing a blog to an auto-generation system

WordPress is far better than I thought. It is making internet writing much more pleasant and easy. Last night I worked for hours doing some posts and I found my efficiency to be greatly increased. Normally it can take me 2 hours to publish one daily photo using my old (and very clumsy) system (see more below). WordPress cuts this time by about a factor of 10. This is fantastic.

My old system required images to be uploaded, links to be updated, writing to be done, pages to be validated, programs to be run, etc. All said, about 5-10 pages/files needed to be edited. Then several scripts and programs need to be run. Using a blog, most of these functions are done automatically. In most respects the blog is therefore much better. I can publish one or two photos very quickly now.

I might write up some detailed notes about my old system, which is centered around a tool called qwp (quick web pages). It does use a web page auto-generation tool that I created and it is fancy in some respects. It gives me a little more control but it costs 10 times the time and effort. It takes the html and combines any included files along with any embedded J-script into a template, and then translates it into all J-script. Then that J-script program is compiled into an executable program. The executable program is then run, and its output produces the web page. Other pre-translation steps can involve xslt and markdown translation phases, so included portions can be in xml, markdown, or html. So there are many levels of translation in my old system. My daily photo pictures for the last 2-3 years have been auto-generated using this system. For example, this photo page is auto-generated. It’s fancy, very hard to use, and the web pages don’t look good (- unless I use a better template). But here, WordPress is 10 times faster and easier, and the results look a lot better.

The ajax based front end is pretty fancy and is equivalent to using a simple Microsoft Word to create your writing. This writing is wysiwyg (what you see is what you get).

I am finally catching on to blogging. Many people have blogged for years.