TonyJiang.com’s second anniversary has arrived, and just like last anniversary I decided to write an article about my web ventures of the previous 12 months. Compared to the first year, there weren’t as many major events, because I didn’t move the sites nor did I have as much time to work on my websites. I have added one new website to the tonyjiang.com network in the past 12 months, and all the other sites are doing okay. Keep on reading if you want to find out the details of my (not so) exciting ventures on the web during the last year.
TonyJiang.com officially came into existence on the August of 2006, which is when I moved all my websites from a free webhost to a new paid server and acquired the domain name. After one year of the server, almost all of the traffic has successfully transferred to the new address, which means that the big move is officially complete. During the last year there haven’t been any major downtimes that were due to the webhost. However, a couple of months ago my website was hacked for the first time. The hackers broke in through a vulnerability in one of the modules in my main website, and after they got in they started deleting stuff and putting up their “this site was hacked” pages. Fortunately, I had a backup copy of everything so it only took about a day to restore my sites. I have since upgraded the problem module and taken steps to prevent such an incident from happening again. I think the only reason why my site was hacked was because of the vulnerable module. Otherwise, hacking a website that only draws a 100-200 visitors a day isn’t exactly worth the effort. Well, I suppose there are some people who just like to break other people’s stuff, and this is probably the case for the hack on my website.
In terms of developments for my network of sites, there is only one major addition to the network. The new site is JP’s Badminton Blog. The Badminton Blog is a Chinese and English blog that belongs to my badminton-loving relative, but I also contribute posts as well. Since I don’t have the time or skill to code my own blogging system, I used a widely-available open source system. I did however customize the theme and I added some useful modules to the system. The blog hasn’t really been drawing a lot of audiences, but at least it’s doing better than the Travel Log. Other than the new blog, I’ve made some small changes here and there throughout the network, but I don’t have as much time to work on my sites as last year because I have to go to school or work full-time for the entire year.
Additions and developments are important to a website, but at the end the most important part of a website is its performance, which refers to the amount of visitors it draws and the amount of ad revenue it makes. Compared to last year, my websites on average have received more visitors and page loads this year, and this is mostly due to traffic going to my crabbing guide and smash bros. guide. My Smash Bros. Guide received a surge in visitors when the new Smash Brothers game was released, but the traffic has since died down. On the other hand, my crabbing guide is still going strong and it remains as the best performing website in my network. In terms of ad revenue, my earned slightly more in this year than during the first year, but it is still significantly less than my ad revenue before I moved to the new server. Overall, my traffic level has returned to what it was before I moved my websites, but ad revenue only increased slightly. Hopefully the performance of my network will continue to improve in the coming years.
That’s pretty much all for 2007-2008 in terms of my websites. I don’t have any big plans for my websites in the upcoming year. Right now I have a project in the planning stages, but it will probably be a while before I collect enough data to even start working on the new website. Anyways, here’s to another happy birthday to TonyJiang.com and thank you to everybody who bothered to visit my sites.