Now a Blog

What better way to end this year and decade but with a hodgepodge post consisting of three completely unrelated topics?

Read more

I’m on winter vacation right now, and I don’t plan on going anywhere. Therefore, there’s no better things for me to do but to pay some attention to my oft neglected personal website. Over the last four or five days, I have been busy converting TJ Online from Xoops to Wordpress, and the website you now see is the finished product of that effort. Xoops is a nice piece of software, but over the years I’ve discovered that it’s a bit overkill for a personal website. I chose to convert to Wordpress because… everyone else is running Wordpress. It is the most popular blogging platform out there for a reason, so it seems like a good choice. Converting my site into a blog also will help motivate me to write more… or at least I hope ;). I’ve also chosen to convert this site because it gets very little visitors, so screwing around with this site won’t really affect my total traffic by much.

Since Wordpress didn’t have an automatic import tool for Xoops and that I wanted to keep as much of my old data as possible, I manually moved every article, download, and gallery picture from Xoops to Wordpress. By manual, I meant manually copying and pasting posts, uploading photos, and modifying the database via PHPMyAdmin. It’s boring and time consuming work, but I am used to doing this stuff. Compared to moving my data, installing Wordpress and plug-ins was pretty easy. I really like the fact that Wordpress has integrated a plug-in search into the admin panel. It makes finding and installing plug-ins so convenient. Compared to Xoops, Wordpress is simpler. There are definitely some areas where Xoops is stronger, but thus far I have found that Wordpress is meeting my needs for this website.

Anyways, this is more or less the completed website. I might add some small things here or there, but the look (modified from the understated but elegant “Piano Black” theme from mono-lab) is here to stay. Since the theme itself is primarily black and shades of gray, I will try to use bright backgrounds to liven up this place, and as a start I’ve employed a photo of some of the fuchsia in my family’s backyard. Anyways, hopefully all the changes will make this site more user friendly and attract more visitors.

Lastly, I hope everyone will have a happy holidays.

8XGZS7JQH6ZK

It’s been three years since the inception of the tonyjiang.com domain. In the last year not too much has been happening to my websites as my efforts were focused on work, school, and something else. This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to write about though, so keep on reading for the inside scoop into tonyjiang.com’s third year on the world wide web.

Read more

Yes it’s true: tonyjiang.com and its core websites (the crabbing guide and smash bros. guide) has received their 200,000th unique visitor today! Okay, there are some websites out there who get 200,000 visitors every month, but it’s still quite an achievement for my humble little sites. A big thank you to all of those who visited over the last six or seven years. I have free time to spend on these websites as I grow older and have more responsibilities, but I’ll try to add some quality content whenever I can.

After four months of working, I’m back in school once again. Going back to school means I will be a bit busier at home because of all the studying and the assignments, so I probably won’t have much time to write new articles, create new artwork, or work on other web-related projects. That doesn’t mean I won’t try to squeeze a bit of time in though, but content for this site might be a little scarce for a while. Well, I think I said this a couple of posts ago and it turned out to be blatant lie when I posted two articles right after. Hopefully I’ll find something interesting to write about while I’m at school.

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.

Read more

In the past week or so I took the time to re-haul my venerable Smash Guide. The site looks similar to the old design as I only cleaned up the graphics a bit, but the underlying code is now quite different from before. As with most of my websites, the Smash Guide now has a table-less layout with CSS. I also cleaned up the code and made many changes/corrections to the content. Hopefully the changes will help attract more visitors and give them a better experience.

The coming August marks the one year anniversary of tonyjiang.com and my first year on paid hosting. In celebration to this joyous occasion, I decided to write an article documenting my website experience in the past year. Important events include the big move from my old server to the current one, and the accompanying effects. There were some ups and some downs, but overall my sites seem to have survived and they have not fallen into the bottom of the internet pit (they are already there). If you are interested in what went on with all the tonyjiang.com websites, read on to find out the juicy details.

Read more

Although I’m working all through the summer, I managed to find some time to improve the design of the crabbing guide, my first and still most popular website. Now the site features nicer graphics and a tableless layout. I even cleaned up the code and used headings for a little bit of search engine optimization too. Go check it out.

For the past week or so I’ve been working hard to upgrade my dad’s badminton portal website so that it can take advantage of the features offered by my current webhost. The website has become my first self-coded PHP website, and my second table-less layout after the travel journal website. Of course I read a lot of tutorials and books in order to this, and after working day after day implementing features and ironing out the bugs, the site is finally ready for show time. Obviously being written by myself, the website is nowhere near as advanced as my main site here powered by XOOPS, but it’s enough for the purpose of serving articles. Click the earlier in this paragraph if you want to visit.