Part 2: Why are you using Google Plus for Blogging

I thought I would follow up on that piece I wrote about last night about Google+. I received a hefty amount of feedback over at Hacker News on this, but I wanted to address some of the comments on this weblog, as I felt it was the wrong venue for anything longer than a short paragraph.

“Crcsmnky” asks:

Is there any difference between Wordpress hosting your blog vs. Google+?

There are monumentally large technical differences between Wordpress and Google+. First of all, with Wordpress, Moveable Type, Squarespace et al. you get human readable URLs: e.g., ~/this-is-a-human-readable-url.html as opposed to: ~/1123456789101112345/posts/11xyzabCD. Secondly, my personal preference is to write with plain text files using Markdown. I always start with a Markdown document, and most CMSs worth their weight in salt support that. Lastly, owning your own domain name, and having your content reside under that is also incredibly important. I suppose if you don’t really care about any of that stuff, then Google+ is may fine for you.

On a side note, I just tested the data export function of Google+, and it gives me individual html files for every post. That’s actually quite nice, but it would be a pain if you wanted to then take your content and move it into a CMS. With regards to the aforementioned CMSs, their exported XML documents are all compatible with each other. This means you would have a relatively painless experience with importing into these systems — all while preserving URL structures, images and post formatting.

“Th” cites:

I just migrated my WordPress blog to Jekyll recently without much difficulty. Data can be exported to Jekyll from Tumblr and Posterous as well (I’m not sure how well those migrations work though): https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/Blog-Migrations

I too have not tested Tumblr or Posterous migrations over to Jekyll, so I can’t vouch for how well that process works. I simply can’t recommend either of these platforms if you’re serious about writing. Blogging doesn’t have to be expensive, and as I pointed out earlier, you don’t need to sacrifice ease of use or quality with some sort of hosted CMS solution.

Testing performance

“Nextparadigms” cites:

512 MB of RAM is pretty low these days when it comes to browsing. Even without Google+, I heard that you can usually have only 3 tabs open at one time, or otherwise they would reload. Full websites use a lot of RAM these days. A site like Google+ can use a lot more than average.

“Orijing” asks:

The same can be said about Facebook, so what makes Google+ unique in that regard?

Pulling up Web Inspector in Safari, I did a quick test on Google+, Facebook and my site. Here’s what I found:

• Google+: 174 requests | 1.97MB transferred
• Facebook: 111 requests | 1.12MB transferred
• My site: 39 requests | 1.06MB transferred

Addendum: These tests were run when with the browser cache first emptied, and then a full page reload.

This may be obvious to many nerds, but another huge advantage of running your own site, and choosing your own CMS carefully is how you can optimize for readability and page load performance. The difference in performance on a fully page load on either Google+ or my site is quite a large difference. Now, comparing a monolithic service like Google+ to my own site isn’t exactly like comparing apples to apples, but if you care about performance — among other things — the differences are striking and can’t be denied.