Fun fact: it was terrible. Most bloggers I know hated it.
Wordpress is a bucket of poop too, but it has the quality that when you press 'publish', the site is updated in seconds, not minutes.
(I believe MT has changed since then).
The main problem to solve is inter-page dependency. The rest is not that hard /famouswords.
It's called a caching plugin, but it also compresses and minifies stuff. Any site can benefit from loading faster. You can turn it on and let it go. It has sane defaults.
I want you to print this out and stick it somewhere out of sight. When one day you are linked to on Reddit, Slashdot, a major news site or the like, pull it out for a hearty laugh.
Define "sufficient resources". It might be enough for your normal traffic, but without caching those blogs will crash from the /. effect (unexpected traffic spike).
Even with caching, I suspect Apache would fall over if I got slashdotted.
An easy solution like those plugins is such a big win for so little work, I just can't agree with "it's good enough for normal use". The last thing you want is for your blog to fail when you are getting a traffic spike.
Around 2002-2003, I built a gigantic, sub-optimal, regex-heavy Perl script for automatic updating of webcomic sites (it's still in use on several sites I know of, ugh).
Each day of the archive had its own separate HTML page generated from a template.
I never got around to the complexity of supporting selective updates, because brute-force regenerating the entire archive every time the script ran, even to several thousand comics, took just seconds on anything but Windows (whose file I/O was just too bloody slow, but even then the run only took a minute or so).
That is an implementation issue. That problem is in no way inherent to static content.
Pre-gzipped pages are nice too. :)
The permissions changes it asks for are because caching plugins need to create files on the server and most servers are either poorly configured or managment of groups:users is difficult, so temporarily requesting that users modify permissions so that the caching plugin can create the files for the user improves the installation experience via lowering the technical experience needed and the number of steps required.
I don't recommend suPHP in practice as it's quite slow, similar if not better security can be realized by using a reverse proxy, and then running PHP in fastcgi mode for example with a backend web server.
If you are fine with your comments residing somewhere else, yes. I usually prefer to have them with me and to have them search engine indexable (that's free content created from users for me)
Here's how I think blogging should work:
1. Visit a web app where you create your blog post, add pictures, use your rich text editor, that sort of thing.
2. Click the "Publish" button, which generates static HTML and runs any other processing like tag generation or pngcrush.
3. Your static HTML gets pushed out to some server that does the hosting for you. It could even be one of those really cheap shared hosting providers.
If you really want comments, let someone like Disqus or Intense Debate handle it. Pretty much any dynamic feature you need can be outsourced.