The personal blog of a regular guy

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working on some of my other websites and the work is finally (nearly) complete. Firstly, the main area of Travel Log has been rebuilt using WordPress at the request of its authors. For this redesign, I used a stock theme and didn’t need to do any importing as there wasn’t too much content in that site.

On to the second piece of news, JP’s Badminton Portal has also been rebuilt using WordPress, and what’s more it has been combined with JP’s Badminton Blog and moved to it’s own domain, www.jpbadminton.com. Formerly, the Badminton Portal was run using a self-wrote PHP content management system and the Badminton Blog ran on Textpattern. I had the Badminton Portal separate because I wanted to make the site truly bilingual (in English and Simplified Chinese), but after thinking about it I decided to combine the two sites to make administration easier. My self-wrote PHP script was buggy at places anyways. Importing from the Badminton Blog to the new Badminton Portal was fairly easy as there is an import script available online, but all the articles from the old Badminton Portal had to be manually moved. I also built a custom theme for the site using Thematic Theme Framework. There are still some minor tweaks for the new Badminton Portal, but it’s ready for visitors.

Hopefully the changes to both websites will improve the visitors’ experiences and draw more traffic.

TonyJiang.com has a new home! These last few days I have been busy moving my websites to a new server. For almost four years, my websites have been hosted by 50webs.com on their Webmaster plan. Over these years, I never encountered any major problems with my old host and I am satisfied with their service. However, their plans appear to be a little outdated with the storage and bandwidth limits (or perhaps they are just being honest), so with my current hosting expiring in a month I started looking for a new web host. I have heard no shortage of shared hosting horror stories out on the net, so I spent a couple of days doing research. After looking around, I decided to go with StableHost, primarily because they had a couple code that provided a very good lifetime discount on hosting. Their reputation seems to be decent too, so I signed up with them on their Stable Plus plan.

The move to the new host was pretty straight forward. I initiated the domain transfer process which took about a day, and during that time I transferred all my files over and set up the subdomains. Out of all of my websites, the only one that had any issues was this website. First of all, my new host uses the industry standard Cpanel which for some reason cannot point the default domain (tonyjiang.com or www.tonyjiang.com) to a subfolder within the public_html directory, so this WordPress blog didn’t work when I uploaded it as in a folder into public_html. Once I got that sorted out by uploading the WordPress files into public_html, I was met with the infamous White Screen of Death when I tried to access the admin panel. After searching on the web, I disabled all my plug-ins by renaming the plugins directory within WordPress, and my admin panel came back. After some troubleshooting, it seems that WP-Spamfree was the culprit, which is strange since I didn’t have problems with this plug-in on my old host. I killed that plug-in, but that wasn’t the end of my troubles. Afterwards, I tried to find a new anti-spam plug-in, but that caused WordPress to run into my host’s 32MB PHP memory limit. I didn’t want to delete any of my plug-ins, so I sent a support ticket to my new host, and thankfully they promptly replied by increasing the memory limit and everything was alright again.

I have settled into my new host, and everything looks okay so far. Hopefully my decision to move won’t come back and bite me in the behind. Since my websites receive little traffic, bandwidth and server load shouldn’t pose problems. Hopefully there will be no major downtimes or trouble with the host. Now that tonyjiang.com has found a new home, I’ll probably start working on some of my other websites.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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