Except that’s wrong. WordPress could support larger sites and I specifically remember Times and People Mag blogs being featured on their site– though I think they may have been hosted at WordPress.com. I couldn’t find any references to back me up, so… I can remember that, though, because the first time I decided to try WordPress was when I was moving to self-hosted and I was trying multiple free blogging programs. It was after Lil’lady was born and I’m pretty sure it was the winter of 2004 or early 2005¹. I was looking through the web archive and had a giggle at the memory of trying to figure out how the hell to get that thing working. I tried WordPress and Textpattern and something else that I can’t remember². I settled on WordPress because of the sites using it, their available themes and the support forum. At the time, the WP.org support forums were really popping and users were happy to help noobs get their footing.

I was still happily blogging on Blogger with my political blog³and was getting more serious with the politics. So, I wanted to put my personal stuff somewhere else and why not self hosted? I was reading at different places that you were teh sux if you didn’t self host. Of course, back then I didn’t know shit about anything except basic HTML and how to fix up my Blogger blog. So I had to learn all of that shit. It was tons of fun. I remember picking out the name of my first “rea”l site. It was stupid and long and, actually, makes my head hurt just thinking about it. I don’t remember exactly. I remember my first Yahoo! Geocities site. Mwahaha! That was horrific and pitiful. Anyway, I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to my WordPress blog, but every so often I’d write something about the fam or my religion or something. Then I decided that the name sucked donkey balls and came up with something different. The whole time I was learning how to theme WordPress and add plugins (back then users had to add lines of code to get plugins working. That’s where my tagline came from, you know. “I like to break things” refers solely to my breaking the crap out of my site every time I “updated” my theme. I remember how many times I changed my pseudonym, my site name(s) and, holy shitballs, the themes. I was a theme slut, for sure.

Ah, the memories! What is it about this time of year that always makes me want to walk down blogging memory lane?

So, I was looking for proof of WP being able cache pages and, of course, I went back in time and, well, lost a few hours of my day. I used to be such a WP fangirl. I mean, after I figured out how to do this and that and then I got really into the WP community. I remember I was going to blog for this WP “magazine” and sent a couple of posts in to the dude. He was supposed to pay us. He didn’t pay me⁴ and I stopped writing for him. I think it was 5 posts? That motherfucker has a popular theming company now, by the way. Gods, I hate him. Mostly because his “magazine” idea fell through but he never did pay me.

Anyway, so my point was that it was possible to cache WP powered blogs when HuffPo went live back in May 2005⁵. I don’t know why Huffington chose to start her blog on MT because she’s a huge fan of getting whatever she can get for free– content from other sites and content from HuffPo bloggers, for instance. MT wasn’t free back then and it wasn’t that much easier to publish with it, though it did use static HTML pages. I can’t imagine Six Apart gave their software to Huffington out of the goodness of their collective heart. According to this article, though, they didn’t seem to care. Personally, I think Six Apart fucked up by not forcing them to pay the fee. Whatever Arianna’s reasons for picking MT I doubt it was because WordPress couldn’t do the job. I guess it could’ve been a security issue as MT was closed source and WP was open?

I wanted to leave a comment on the Balloon Juice post because of that comment. I didn’t really care what software HuffPo was using to scam the left blogosphere, but it irritated me a bit to read that WP was incapable of running that it. That reaction was based on my years of being a WP fangirl, of course. Since I needed proof that I was right and my beloved WP didn’t suck⁶, I had to go digging. And, well, when I go digging I tend to get lost in what I’m reading which means this post has taken a long time to write. At least I’m consistent in that.

Just for giggles, go back to the June 1,2005 edition of HuffPo. Now look down the middle column. What do you see? Lemme help.

SF 49′s Training Video: Lesbian Porn, Racial Jokes, Anti-Gay Slurs

And there’s a picture of blurred-out boobies.

I only mention this because the new argument against HuffPo is that they’ve only recently started using sensationalist headlines. Isn’t it nice that they’ve just amped up their use of sensationalism rather than just adopting it? Aww… So, here’s a look at it two years later. They’ve added the content scraping, the gossip column and the boobies.

All this digging around about WordPress v. Movable Type with regards to the left’s favorite online gossip mag has stirred something in me, though. I’m going to redo my site. Aren’t you excited?

1. I thought I started on version 1.4, but that’s wrong. So maybe 1.5? I’m going to look around and see if I don’t have a copy on a disk somewhere.
2. I only remember Textpattern because I really liked it and Google is my friend.
3. I was going to put a link here to the Wayback Machine archive of my old blog. And then I was going to point to another blog that had me linked in 2005. And then I decided to say fuck it all because why the hell do I need to prove any damned thing?
4. I seem to get that a lot.
5. At the link you’ll notice that the first comment is from 6 years ago. That’s 6 years ago from today– February 2011-6= February 2005. Don’t ya love math?
6. Besides the fact that WP is the most popular self-hosted blog software in use right now. I’m of the mind that, considering MT went partially OS, that they didn’t suck that bad back then.