I didn't actually read the whole post, I just noticed right away that when I hit the page, it showed me a collapsed nothing with just the footer and I assumed it was broken, then the content appeared. This was a little weird for me, but I also immediately recognized it was because they are loading the page, then hitting an ajax call to load the page's actual content. After checking comments here, this is probably because the blog is running on meteor.
This is a trend that I sort of understand, but in another way entirely baffles me. While front-end apps are awesome, in this case the content could easily be compiled and served immediately with the page. This would make the load huge amounts faster, and a lot less confusing when every single user shows up and sees a header and collapsed footer every time they visit the page (no cacheing with this ajax method).
On the other hand, like some other people mentioned here, there are cool benefits to running js apps. A realtime post count is a nice tweak you couldn't have with an entirely static site... wait, or is it? No, you definitely could. Have the blog post content as static and then a snippet of js connects to your server's socket and displays the count as soon as it can.
I've seen a lot of people jump all in onto trends in building web apps when they make no sense, and this kind of bothers me. Blogs especially should be static, always. There is simply no reason to be hitting a server every time someone hits your blog, and especially no reason to be hitting an ajax call on page load, because this just makes the blog slow and puts additional unnecessary load on your server. (The number of sites running wordpress that could easily be static and would be much faster and less expensive that way baffles me - a problem begging for a solution.)
So I guess my conclusion is that while I am sure Meteor has a lot of value for real-time intensive apps, it is a ridiculous decision to use it for something like a blog. As web developers, we have a large toolset and the luxury to choose among hundreds of awesome, mostly free tools for any project we work on. Don't get stuck in the mindset where you have one tool that solves every problem (I saw a lot of people do this with rails too) - engineer your app to be the quickest and most efficient it can be : )
This is a trend that I sort of understand, but in another way entirely baffles me. While front-end apps are awesome, in this case the content could easily be compiled and served immediately with the page. This would make the load huge amounts faster, and a lot less confusing when every single user shows up and sees a header and collapsed footer every time they visit the page (no cacheing with this ajax method).
On the other hand, like some other people mentioned here, there are cool benefits to running js apps. A realtime post count is a nice tweak you couldn't have with an entirely static site... wait, or is it? No, you definitely could. Have the blog post content as static and then a snippet of js connects to your server's socket and displays the count as soon as it can.
I've seen a lot of people jump all in onto trends in building web apps when they make no sense, and this kind of bothers me. Blogs especially should be static, always. There is simply no reason to be hitting a server every time someone hits your blog, and especially no reason to be hitting an ajax call on page load, because this just makes the blog slow and puts additional unnecessary load on your server. (The number of sites running wordpress that could easily be static and would be much faster and less expensive that way baffles me - a problem begging for a solution.)
So I guess my conclusion is that while I am sure Meteor has a lot of value for real-time intensive apps, it is a ridiculous decision to use it for something like a blog. As web developers, we have a large toolset and the luxury to choose among hundreds of awesome, mostly free tools for any project we work on. Don't get stuck in the mindset where you have one tool that solves every problem (I saw a lot of people do this with rails too) - engineer your app to be the quickest and most efficient it can be : )