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Professional or really good looking blog

I want to make a blog covering various technologies.

I need the blog to look professional, nice set of colours. Must be fast to navigate and easy to find articles.

I don't care if its free or I have to purchase hosting space.

I have used drupal with a module add in, but its too slow. please recommend?

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Jason C. Levine

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oliverpolden

Drupal is slow out of the box as are other platforms, especially with lots of modules or plugins. To make it fast you need to employ caching. I cover this in my book as in my profile but essentially in order of ease/least effective to most difficult to set up and most effective are:
Standard caching included with the chosen platform. Typically page caching and CSS and js aggregation
Next is a static page cache such as boost for drupal
The fastest is a reverse proxy such as varnish or stingray

There are also other caches such as memcache.

By far the best bang for buck is a static page cache which basically generates a static HTML file and then serves that instead of loading up your platform.

I have several of my sites running varnish:
www.aboutcatbreeds.com
www.rc-model-review.com
www.onlinemagnetism.com

Some pages may be slower on the first page load due to not being cached but if you reload or navigate away and back again then you will find it significantly faster. This means that under load, the pages are served from the cache rather than hitting the platform.

Oliver