we don't use blog functionality on the site any more
switching the popular talks out for a much less expensive query that does the most-commented recently-ish instead
add a limit to the event listing, only show the first hundred
return 'only' 50 events when the user requests a list via the API
removing the only uses of short open tag - this project is still 5.3 compliant and we don't want to require it
Merge branch 'lornajane-minimise-performance-penalties'
Merge pull request #786 from lornajane/no-short-open-tag

Remove the only 2 situations where a short open tag was used; the VM is not configured for this and we don't need it