Writing that sentence makes me feel old, but at the same time I do feel a sense of accomplishment for keeping my domain online for five years. Due to my busy life of being a graduate student, I really haven’t done much to my website in the 2010-2011 period, but that doesn’t mean that there is nothing worth noting down. For one thing, traffic and ad revenue underwent some substantial growth. Read on to find out the details.

As I mentioned in the opening blurb, I am now a graduate student actively engaged in research, and this means I have even less free time than when I was an undergrad. This is one of the reason why there weren’t any major changes to my websites in the last year. The other reason is that a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done last year. I still make a post on my website every once in a while and keep my all the maintenance and backup, but otherwise there were no major developments last year.

Despite the lack of big changes though, my websites actually saw some substantial growth in terms of traffic and ad revenue area. This summer marks the first time ever that that my three core websites (this blog, Crabbing Guide and my Smash Bros. Guide) averaged more than 1000 page views per day. Even better, July 2011 is the first month where my monthly ad earnings was above $100. Yeah, I know $100 per month isn’t exactly impressive and tons of websites make way more than that, but it’s a record for my sites and I’m proud of it. Leading the way of the growth is the Crabbing Guide, my first (started 8 years ago) and still most profitable website. I guess crabbing must have sudden gotten more popular this summer. I always see increase in traffic and earnings in previous summers, but never to the level of this summer.

Moving to some overall statistics and milestones, the three core websites have moved passed 1 million page views and are moving ever closer to the 500,000 unique visitors mark. Including the Badminton Portal and Travel Log, my websites have drawn 150,000 unique visitors and 270,000 page views in the past year measuring from anniversary to anniversary. These numbers represent a solid growth compared to 2009-2010′s 130,000 unique visits and 230,000 page loads and again set a new benchmark my sites. The biggest growth though is in ad earnings, and this year my sites generated ~$840 in revenue compared to last year’s $630. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live off my websites, but more income is always welcome.

It’s been another year of growth for my websites, and hopefully this trend will continue. I’ll do my best to keep my sites up to date, and if I’m up to it introduce some new changes and improvements. Thanks for reading.

I’ll try to keep this post short and concise, so here are the major changes to my websites over the past year in list form:

• TJ Online (this blog and my personal site) was relaunched and rebuilt using WordPress in December of 2009. Previously the site was powered by Xoops which was a nice piece of software, but I felt a blog was more suited for my needs. The new TJ Online became the first of several WordPress blogs under my management.
• In June of 2010, I moved all my websites to a new server. The new server had better features for a lower price than my old webhost, and that’s why I decided to switch. Of course, my websites are nowhere near hitting any of the limits on the old server, but I felt like moving. Three months in, the new webhost has been problem-free so far and hopefully that will continue for a long time to come.
• Also in June, the Old Couple’s Travel Log was rebuilt using WordPress. This is was by request of the author who wanted to post some new travel posts on the website.
• Finally in August, JP’s Badminton Portal and Badminton Blog were combined into the new JP’s Badminton Portal, which was again built using WordPress. A new domain name, www.jpbadminton.com, was purchased for this website and the site features the first custom WordPress theme that I’ve developed.

Other than the major developments,  I’ve been trying my best to maintain my other websites and come up with interesting new content for TJ Online. Changing this website to a blog has encouraged me to write a bit more, and from a numbers standpoint this has been my most productive year at TJ Online. Many of my new posts are more personal in nature, and that’s probably the way it’ll be since I’m not exactly an expert at anything other than procrastinating and wasting time.

Moving on to the statistical side, the core tonyjiang.com websites (TJ Online, crabbing guide and Smash Bros. guide)  received their 300,000 visitor in the last year. With 230,000 page loads and 120,000 unique visitors measured from anniversary to anniversary, overall traffic (including travel log and badminton portal) is up compared to last year’s 70,000 visitors and 150,000 page loads. This year’s traffic numbers are the best that my websites have ever had. They might not be impressive compared to many other sites out there, but I’m pleased so many people have found their way to my sites.  Ad earnings are up as well with this year’s haul being around $630 vs. last year’s $500. It’s been a year of growth for my websites, and hopefully the growth will continue into next year and beyond.

Just like my websites have undergone some big changes over the last year, my own life also went through some major changes as well. I finally graduated with my bachelor’s degree, and now I’m away from home doing graduate studies. This means I’ll probably have even less time to devote to my websites, but I’ll try my best to keep my sites alive. A post every once in a while on this blog shouldn’t be too tall of an order… at least that’s what I’m hoping.  Thanks for reading, and I’ll make sure the fifth anniversary post won’t be three weeks late like this one.

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.

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.

WordPress Tidbits

It’s been a week since I converted this website to WordPress. I have continued to play around with the website, changing some minor details here and there. The most significant change in terms of the design since a week ago is the addition of random backgrounds. I only have three backgrounds thus far, but more will be added to list as I accumulate more photos and artwork. Once I have enough backgrounds, I’ll modify the script so that different months of the year will have a different set of backgrounds so that this blog will always match up with the seasons. Other than the backgrounds, the top menus have been made semi-transparent, but that’s just a tiny change.

Moving on to features of the sites, I have installed a quicktags and smilies bar plug-in to the comment form, so visitors will have an easier formatting comments to their hearts’ content. Hopefully that will encourage some comments, as this site hasn’t received a non-spam comment for a while. I did have to try out a few quicktag/smilies plug-in before I found one that worked out of the box, but once I found the one it was smooth sailing from there.

For the most part, WordPress and all of plug-ins I’ve installed are well-behaved with the notable exception of WP-Postviews, which is used to keep track of how many times a post has been viewed. For some odd reason, WP-Postviews would only count hits from logged-in users (ex me) and not guests even when I set the plug-in to track everyone. The plug-in wouldn’t count anything when I set it to count only guests. After experimenting with the code, I discovered that the $post global variable within the counting function did not return the correct post ID number when a guest loaded a post. The original first few lines of process_postviews() is shown below:

### Function: Calculate Post Views
add_action('wp_head', 'process_postviews');
function process_postviews() {
global $user_ID, $post;
if(!wp_is_post_revision($post)) {
if(is_single() || is_page()) {
$id = intval($post->ID);
$views_options = get_option('views_options');
$post_views = get_post_custom($id);
$post_views = intval($post_views['views'][0]);

In order to get the plug-in to count guest hits, I had to switch to use $wp_query and extract the post ID from there. The modified function is shown below:

### Function: Calculate Post Views
add_action('wp_head', 'process_postviews');
function process_postviews() {
global $user_ID, $wp_query;
if(!wp_is_post_revision($wp_query->post)) {
if(is_single() || is_page()) {
$id = intval($wp_query->post->ID);
$views_options = get_option('views_options');
$post_views = get_post_custom($id);
$post_views = intval($post_views['views'][0]);

I don’t know the reason why the original function didn’t work on my website. I’m guessing it has something to do with the templates of the theme, but now that I have the plug-in working I’m too lazy to investigate.

Artwork

Below is my newest Photoshop artwork. I liked how the grassy knoll and dandelions turned out, but the two kids look like cardboard cutouts. Time to work on my people-drawing skills.

Happy New Year!

Another year has gone by, and along with it another decade as well. 2009 went really quickly for me. I spent eight months working as an intern and four months in school, and time just flashed by. 2010 will be a really important year for me. It will be the year when I finally earn my bachelors degree and (hopefully) it’ll also be the year when I start graduate school. It’ll be a busy year that’s for sure, but I think I’m ready for it. I wish all of you (the 5 random people who read this blog) a Happy 2010 and good luck in the new year. I’ll definitely need some of that luck too

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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As mentioned above, the last 12 months was rather uneventful for my websites. There were no major down times or hacking incidents, although from time to time some bored soul will give this website a poke or two with some SQL injection attempts. In terms of additions and development, only the crabbing guide has seen significant additions because my crab-loving relatives have returned. I’ve also been adding content (at a rather slow pace) to this site, the badminton blog and the badminton portal, but otherwise these sites are still the same as before. In my last anniversary article I wrote that I was working on a new content-based website project, and unfortunately I’m still at the info collection stage. I’m not going to abandon the project, but it’ll probably be a long time before that website ever goes online especially given that next year is my graduating year from college.

To be honest, I really haven’t put too much effort into the tonyjiang.com websites last year. School and co-op work are some of the reasons, but the main reason is because I (re)started a personal blog and I invested a lot of effort into it. The blog is currently hosted on Blogger, and so I won’t mention the url here yet. In the blog I usually write about the anime and manga series I read and watch, and I also share personal artwork (which are also posted in the gallery). My efforts to promote my blog did pay off somewhat and it now averages 700 visitors and 1200 page loads per day. In case you are wondering, this is more traffic than all of the tonyjiang.com websites combined. On the downside, writing blog posts take up a fair bit of time, and despite the decent traffic the ad revenue have been dismal for my blog. Although a lot of my efforts have gone into the blog, I have no plans to abandon my other websites. The blog is only for anime, manga, artwork, and the odd personal quip. All of my other articles will be posted here.

Speaking of traffic and ad revenues, both of these measurements have grown slightly in the past year compared to 2007-2008. All of the tonyjiang.com websites combined for over 70,000 visitors, almost 150,000 page loads, and about $500 of revenue over the past year. This is up from 59,000 visitors, 130,000 page loads, and ~$425 ad revenue in 2007-2008. Not dramatic growth, but growth nonetheless. The traffic is seasonal in pattern, with the summer having significantly more visitors than the cold seasons, and this is because the majority of the traffic goes to the crabbing guide. Crabbing is seasonal in nature, and therefore so is the traffic to my guide. Not too long ago, my websites also reached the milestone of 200,000 unique visitors. I know there are websites that get more than 200,000 visitors in a day, but for a group of personal websites 200,000 is not too shabby at all. In celebration I decided to give myself a pat on the back .

That’s all I have to say for the 2008-2009 year in regards to tonyjiang.com. As mentioned before, the next year will be my last year as an undergraduate student, and I’ll be quite busy trying to make the grade and applying for grad school. Therefore, I don’t really foresee any major developments with these websites in the next 8 months or so. I’m thinking of moving my popular (in comparison to my other sites) personal blog on to a WordPress installation on my paid web space, but I haven’t committed to anything yet. I’m also thinking of moving my websites to another webhost. The current host have been reliable and problem-free thus far, but the bandwidth limit and storage seems rather inadequate when compared to the plans offered by many other hosts at the same cost. The move will probably happen about a year from now though, since I have already extended my plan for another year. It’s not like I’m in any danger of hitting the limits though . Thanks for reading this article and hopefully I’ll still be around to write the 4th anniversary post for tonyjiang.com.

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.