I have been testing quite a few different blog systems lately as I feel the need to "voice" my opinion on a variety of subjects. There are many systems out there...most with database driven content and some using flat files or markdown files. My concerns with using those systems that do not use a database is that if the blog becomes popular, the flat file systems will not be as fast to load content and in today's environment, speed is an extremely important facet of the internet user.

We have been trained to expect instant access to whatever information we are looking for and having to wait 5 seconds seems like an eternity. As such, my testing of the flat file blog systems have come down to two finalists...FlatPress and HTMLy. Both have great systems with specific pluses and to be frank, I really like both of them. The reason I am leaning towards the HTMLy system is that the developer(s) claim that the speed of the system will not be affected by the number of articles or visitors.

One big plus of the FlatPress system is that it has a comment module that works right out of the box without having to configure anything, and a blog system without comments leaves much to be desired. The HTMLy comment module is considerably more difficult to configure (at least for me) and while I have not given up on it, I'm not far from that point. I am persistent if nothing else and I hope to get the comment module up and running sooner rather than later. Stay tuned