Category: Site News

Posts pertaining to the website, usually about design and feature updates.

Happy Holidays

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This post has 1,870 views.

I’ve traveled back home for winter break once again, and I’m glad to be home for a couple of weeks. The academic semester ended a little earlier than previous years, which meant I could go home earlier and save a few bucks on my plane tickets. As usual, I don’t have any plans. Grad students don’t get long vacations, and I do have to work on my research. On the other hand, I do have more free time on my hands since I don’t have to worry about shopping and cooking or classes. Maybe I’ll try to go learn skiing. One thing I’ll do is eat a lot, since it’s the holidays, and the Chinese food in Vancouver is much better than what I can get at my place of study. Hopefully I don’t gain too much weight over the holidays :lol: . I will also try to give my humble blog a new look. I’m probably looking for the minimalist look, but I want some transparency and rotating backgrounds that the previous theme had. I’ll play around with the new Twenty-twelve theme to see if I can modify it to my likings.

Anyways, I wish you all a happy and safe holidays.

TonyJiang.com: Year 6

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This post has 2,551 views.

I haven’t paid much attention to my websites lately, and thus I have completely forgotten about the anniversary of getting my own domain name until today. The anniversary is somewhere in August, but I don’t remember the exact date anymore. TonyJiang.com has been on the world wide web for 6 years and I have been running websites for probably past a decade now. I’ll be running websites for as long as I am able, and there should be plenty of years left for this personal blog and my other websites.

Over the last year, I haven’t done much work on my websites, but they’ve chugging along pretty well. Traffic is comparable to last year with my crabbing guide, Smash Bros. guide and this blog combining for around 700-1000 page views per day. Despite no real new content and steady traffic, ad revenue actually went up, and 2011-2012 is the first time my websites made over $1000 in a year, and I had a record-breaking month of nearly $150 in revenue. $1000 is obviously not enough for me to run websites as a full time job, but it’s a nice bit of extra income for a student like myself. My crabbing guide earns the vast majority of the ad revenue, showing that my first website is still the most useful website to visitors. Hopefully the ad revenue will keep on rolling in.

So what’s my plan for the next year? Not much. Graduate school takes a lot of time and energy. Of course I want to provide new content that will draw visitors, but I don’t have much to write these days other than post the occasional travel photos. Some people get a great idea and make it big on the internet, but I haven’t found that great idea yet. I’ll keep thinking about it though, and in the meantime I’ll continue running my websites. Hopefully I’ll remember to post on the anniversary date next year.

TonyJiang.com: Fifth Year on the Net

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This post has 3,046 views.

Tonyjiang.com has been on the net for half a decade.

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.

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TonyJiang.com: Fourth Year on the Net

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This post has 13,332 views.

I can’t believe it’s been four years already since I set up the tonyjiang.com domain. Actually, the anniversary is somewhere in August, but I was busy moving to a new place to start grad school so I didn’t have the time to make this post until today. Unlike 2008-2009, there were plenty of big changes to my website this year. Read on if you want to find out the inside scoop about tonyjiang.com over the last 12 or so months.

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Badminton Portal and Travel Log Rebuilt

TJ 1 Comment
This post has 4,800 views.

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.

Moved to a New Server

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This post has 3,528 views.

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 coupon 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.

TJ Online Relaunched

TJ 1 Comment
This post has 3,626 views.

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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TonyJiang.com: Third Year on the Net

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This post has 3,273 views.

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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200,000 Unique Visitors!

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This post has 3,734 views.

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.