Chan's Personal Blog

This year, I was back in Victoria for three weeks for my annual Christmas vacation. I thought it was going to be quiet time, but I came across a project that amounted to three weeks of raw execution. My task, to modernize and relaunch vanessajeweller.com website in three weeks.

I rarely do private commercial websites these days but this project piqued my interest. I did a quick market analysis and found about a dozen jewellery stores in the Greater Victoria website. Many of the stores that are ranked high on search engines weren't really great websites to begin with. Besides the major jewellery store chains, a lot of competitor websites looked like something out of early 2000s. I felt there was an opportunity to crush the competition with everything that I know about the web now.

Web Development in 2005

The vanessajeweller.com website was first put up in 2005. Here's a screenshot of the old website we were working with:



Some of the primary problems:

• Low quality photos.
• Not a lot of content.
• No content management system.
• No search engine optimization.
• No data analytics.

Looking back at 2005, it's pretty incredible to think about how much technology and the internet has changed since then. As a web developer, a lot of the modern conveniences we take for granted simply weren't in place back then.

Here's a taste of what the web was like in 2005:

• Social media wasn't a big deal. Facebook for businesses wasn't around. Twitter didn't even exist.
• Digital photography wasn't on-par with traditional film cameras yet. DSLR cameras were insanely expensive. Remember when you had to scan photos into the computer?
• Open source content management systems were still very complicated to use and setup.
• The mobile web as we know it today simply did not exist. There were no android or ios devices.
• Web developer tools such as FireBug didn't exist. Debugging CSS/HTML/Javascript was a pain.
• Internet Explorer 6 controlled 89% of the market. Firefox 1.5 had just come out, and controlled 6% of the market.
• Tableless CSS-based websites were starting to gain traction. XHTML 1.0 was apparently the next hot thing.

Hack Day

I only had finite time to work on this project, and the whole thing needed to be shipped before I left Victoria. In the spirit of hack day, I started brainstorming on how I could rapidly bootstrap a professional looking site with a little cash and a little time.

Photography

Priority one was sexy photos for the website. I needed professional looking jewellery photos to maximize the wow factor of the site. I spent a night on the internet scouring for tutorials on jewellery photography. After I was done, I felt like Neo out of the Matrix saying, "woah, I know jewellery photography." A critical piece that I needed was a macroscopic lens; unfortunately they cost at least $400, and I wasn't going to drop that kind of cash for a one-time project. I ended up finding a place in town that rented them for $20/day.

Next, I needed a good digital camera to take photos with. My brother had a DSLR camera available, and he had taken quite a number of courses in photography, so I recruited him to the project. You can take a look at his side of the story on his blog.

Step three was lighting for the photography. A lot of the professionals were using white LED lighting to light up their jewellery. Normal lights give off a yellow-ish light which doesn't look good. I serendipitously found a solution for this while attending a games night at Patrick and Rebecca's. They were outfitting their cabinets with LED strips; they were completely self-contained, very inexpensive, and required very little soldering. I used to have to design circuits and solder together wire, resisters, and LEDs which was a lot of work. My friend Chad happened to have the LED strips with the exact colour temperature I needed, and Patrick gave me a couple power supplies. We bootstrapped together a LED light source, and we were on our way.

Finally, I figured out that we needed a couple plastic backgrounds to stage jewellery on. I needed a white plastic to give off a soft-reflection, and a piece of black acrylic for a dramatic reflection on a black background. I was able to source my materials from a local plastic vendor, and that set me back $60.

The Day Of The Photoshoot

With all our materials in hand, we did a day of photography on site.

My brother and I at the photoshoot, using LED lighting, white plastic background, DSLR with macro lens, and a light box.

Staging jewellery on a black acrylic background.

Final product shot of engagement ring.

It took us about a day to finish photographing everything. My brother produced about two hundred photos. We went through the shots, and made a shortlist of thirty shots that would make it to the website.

The Web In 2012

With the photos in place, it was my turn to throw in my expertise. When I was scoping out the project, I knew I wanted to focus on the following areas:

• Content Management System.
• Search Engine Optimization.
• Social Media Integration.
• Site Speed Performance.
• Data Analytics.

Each of these site features were areas that I could comfortably beat the competition in. Each of the features actually all support search engine optimization as well (which affects your Google/Yahoo/Bing rankings), so it was crucial to have a coherent strategy.

Content management systems have become commoditized and the open source versions of this software are very full featured, so I went with Joomla. There was no sense in reinventing the wheel. In addition, one of the non-profits committees that I sit on recently made a motion to move their site to Joomla, so I figured it was in my interest to learn Joomla. I spent about eight hours reading documentation, reviewing tutorials, playing around with its code, and was ready to build a site on Joomla. Cue Neo saying, "Woah, I know Joomla."

Having the content management system taken care of meant I could focus on writing content for the website. In addition, it gave me the infrastructure to host a blog on the site which is quite important because Google favours sites with fresh content.

Performance is another critical aspect of web development these days. Google has said site speed matters in search engine ranking these days, so it's very important to get it right. I spent a couple days optimizing the website code, and managed to shave off 500 milliseconds from the site so far. More optimizations to come as I collect more live traffic data.

The social media aspect of the website is still relatively new to me, and I will learn this as I go. Preliminary data is quite impressive, and I'm seeing more social referrals than organic web search referrals. That being said, a couple data points doesn't mean much, so we'll have to see the long-term trend on this.

The Finished Product

After three weeks of writing content, coding, and optimizing, I finally relaunched vanessajeweller.com.



I was quite happy at the speed of the project. We went from idea to finished product in three weeks. It was a nice change of pace. The websites that I typically work on these days are used by tens of millions of users, and you need to setup a ton of infrastructure to support that kind of traffic. When you operate on that kind scale, it's hard to launch things fast.

The other takeaway is just how much more a web developer can do today in 2012. If you asked me to build such a site back in 2005 in three weeks, I would have told you that it was impossible. As a programmer, we live in exciting times because we have so many tools, platforms, and infrastructure to build on top of.

Anyway, let me know what you think about the new site. I'm always look for feedback.

Yesterday, Chan Productions participated in the internet blackout in an effort to protest the SOPA/PIPA bill which is being debated in the U.S. Government. Other large websites such as Wikipedia, BoingBoing, Reddit, etc. blacked out their websites in protest. This is what our website looked like yesterday:



For accessibility, this is the blackout message I had on the site:


The dust has settled from the online protest, and Digital Trends has compiled statistics about the blackout:


We'll see if this was enough to kill the bills. Learn more about SOPA/PIPA.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to present to you, the annual 'Best Of Chan' photo collection. This is a collection of my favourite moments from last year which have been curated from my Flickr photo archive. It brings back a lot of memories of all that had come in 2011, both the challenges and victories. I've also put together a sound track to complement your viewing experience, so please hit play on the Grooveshark Music Player below and lets start the slideshow.



Soundtrack:

1. 'Venice Rooftops' From The Assassin's Creed Soundtrack - Jesper Kyd
2. 'Set Fire To The Rain' - Adele

Enjoy!

P.S. I've got other 'Best Of Chan' albums from previous years as well. Here's the 2010 edition, and the 2009 edition.

With the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, I came across a pretty incredible story from the Washington Post entitled, "F-16 pilot was ready to give her life on Sept. 11."



I had a number of conversations about that fateful day. The typical question is always, "where were you when 9/11 happened?" I noticed that a lot of Americans view the event as exclusively an American event; however, it definitely affected all of North America, and Canada was definitely affected.

One of the conversations went like this:
American: Where were you on 9/11?
Chan: On a Canadian navy base.
America: Wait, Canada has an army?
Chan: ...
Chan: Who said anything about an army?
America: Why would Canada need a military?

In either case, to prove that Canada does in fact have a military, this was where I was on 9/11. Home of the Pacific Fleet:



The other really strange thought is that there are kids right now that know nothing about 9/11 because they were born after it.

A year ago, I was lamenting how I had finished reading only two books. I was thinking, that's not good, I'm not reading as much as I used to. Was I get dumber? I had noticed that with my schedule, I rarely had large blocks of time that I could spend reading. Instead, I had these slivers of time available in-between tasks, 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there. This disjointed schedule was much better suited for reading articles and news on the internet.

It was hard to quantify exactly how much I was reading on the internet though. With a traditional book, you had page numbers, and back in my childhood days, we would always record how many pages you had read as a learning metric. Unfortunately with internet articles, it's hard to judge since every site varies in page layout, font, etc.

To help count how much I was reading online, a friend at work introduced me to Delicious, a social bookmarking utility. Basically every page I visited, I could bookmark and tag with metadata. It was also nice that my blog could pull the latest articles I was reading from Delicious (which you see on the left rail here).

Managing bookmarks on Delicious was incredibly useful because I used to use Firefox to manage all my bookmarks, but it was incredibly hard to find old bookmarks. If I was on another computer, I wouldn't have access to those bookmarks stored locally on my other computer (yes, I'm aware latest version of Firefox solves this problem with sync). I've also had Firefox crash on me, and I lost all my bookmarks before. So, it was settled, I would store and share all my bookmarks online with Delicious.

August 31st, 2010, I embarked on my quest to measure how much I read online. In one year, I have amassed 3679 bookmarks.

Here's some stats that I crunched.

Top 20 Domains I Read From

# of bookmarks I save over time.

Top 25 Topics I Read About

america, politics, military, internet, business, technology, google, history, obama, science, china, finances, funny, security, geopolitics, terrorism, revolution, video_games, protest, libya, mobile, recession, yahoo, afghanistan, jobs

Top 20 Domains I Read From

43% of the content I read comes Yahoo!, Business Insider, and Wired Magazine.

Domain	# Bookmarks
news.yahoo.com	620
www.businessinsider.com	497
www.wired.com	494
www.youtube.com	105
www.nytimes.com	79
www.bbc.co.uk	64
www.guardian.co.uk	56
i.imgur.com	49
finance.yahoo.com	47
www.rockpapershotgun.com	38
www.telegraph.co.uk	37
www.time.com	34
en.wikipedia.org	32
english.aljazeera.net	31
techcrunch.com	27
www.washingtonpost.com	27
www.cbc.ca	25
online.wsj.com	24
www.huffingtonpost.com	20
www.reuters.com	17

Bookmarks By Day Of Week

Looks like I read the most on Mondays.

Become a fan of me on Delicious: http://www.delicious.com/the_chan!

I just got back from a week in the mountains serving in Royal Family Kids Camp (RFKC). It's a summer camp dedicated to neglected and abused children which is sponsored by my church. This year, we had about 30 kids. Each cabin had two kids, two camp counselor, and one assistant counselor, so the kids get a lot of attention and supervision. The rest of this blog entry will just be a number of mini-stories from camp that comes to mind.

Home of the Underdogs

Before camp started, I was talking to some of the organizers of RFKC, and one of the problems they face was a marketing problem, in that people didn't know what RFKC was. I spent the week thinking about a clever unofficial tagline for the camp. I've come up with "RFKC: Home Of The Underdogs." There's two meanings behind it. First, if you look at the kids that attend the camp, they are the ultimate underdogs of society. The second meaning was by the people who volunteer to help out at camp. I looked through the rosters and thought, this is quite a ragtag band of people, how could this group of people possibly pull off a successful camp; yet, by the grace of God, we're able to pull off a great camp. There are definitely a lot of underdogs on staff.

Everyone loves an underdog story, and I love betting on the underdog.

I Am Chan

Since the kids are in the state foster care system, there are a lot of extra privacy and security concerns for the children. One of the restrictions is that we can't let the kids know our last names because the system doesn't want the kids trying to contact us after camp is over. Unfortunately most people call me 'Chan', 'Chan Can', 'Channy Chan Chan', and other variations. There were a number of times that the other counselors would inadvertently call me 'Chan' and I would give them this shocked stare; they would pause and then realize their folly and try to quickly change the subject before the kids caught on.

Hoarders

One of the things highlighted in our training is that some neglected kids who are not fed properly will develop a habit of hoarding food. Hoarding is a defence mechanism for them because they don't know when the next time they will be fed. This year I actually witnessed this behaviour in some of the kids. During meal time they would grab a plate of food, eat a little bit, hide some food in their clothes, and go up for more food and repeat. They also had a tendency of eating very quickly. We would explain to them that they didn't need to rush or hoard because they could eat as much food as they wanted, and there was plenty of food, but that doesn't work for the first couple days. Once you have a couple days of consistency, where you prove that there is plenty of food, and they won't go hungry, then their defence mechanism goes down and they start trusting you and start eating normally.

A Test Of Wills

Monday is typically the hardest day in my opinion because you get your kids, and the kids and counselors don't know each other very well yet in terms of social/cultural norms, expectations, and boundaries. We had one kid who was 11 years old who was quite challenging because mentally and physically he had developed slower and was more like an 8 year old. The kid was also attention starved, and would constantly talk and make noise to get attention. The constant talking made it quite interesting for bedtime because he would keep everyone up in the cabin. The other two counselors had the night off, so I had to take care of the situation. As a result, I stood next to the kid's bunk and told him that he needed to lay down and not make noise. I also explicitly told him that I could literally stand there all night. The challenge was on, and for the next 30 minutes he kept trying to test this boundary, and I didn't yield. I stood there and shushed him every time he started making loud noise again.

By the 30 minute mark he had given up and started sleeping; however, I had a feeling he wasn't going to get into a deep sleep, so I stood there as a precaution. Fifteen minutes later, he woke up again and tried to misbehave but he saw me standing there and gave up and slept. I assume when he fell asleep the first time, he lost track of time (it helps that the room doesn't have any clocks, and he didn't wear a watch) and when he woke up the second time, he must have thought I was really going to stand there the whole night if if needed.

The irony is that this kid would always complain about being tired and wanting to sleep during the day.

God Moments

All of the counselors arrive at camp a day early (Sunday) in order to setup and prepare. That Sunday night, Pastor Art gave communion and addressed us all about how important this camp was. He noted how we were doing God's work and we would be helping mend, restore, and encourage these neglected and abused children. The verse Psalm 82:3 came to mind, "Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed." As of late in my prayer life, the phrase, "if you tell me something worth fighting for, I'll fight that war" was a recurring theme. That Sunday night, I just knew through and through that I was in the right place, at the right time, with the right cause.

One of the exceptional things about this year was that all of the kids in the cabin this year wanted to pray at nights. Normally you have to coerce kids into doing things like pray, but they were all wanting to do it. Even during they day they would ask if they could pray at night. The kids were even fighting over who could pray during meal time. I guess that's a good problem to have.

On the final day of camp, it's easy to just turn your brain on autopilot and just cruise to the finish line because you're tired and the kids will be going home. Everyone stayed diligent and there were some pretty incredible stories from the final hours of camp. For my team, the kids were participating in the Hope Tree activity where they were writing down their hopes and dreams, and we would pray for that. It was kind of heart-wrenching that some of the simple things that we take for granted like seeing your own family is such a distant dream for some of the kids. Some of the kids opened up and talked about why they were in foster care because of what their parents had done, and it was just shocking hearing what people would do to children. What an incredible cost to children and society. In the closing ceremonies, the kids were just so appreciative for everything we had done for them. A lot of them didn't want to go home because for they felt like this was a real family.

The hardest part is coming home, and watching the kids go back to the environments they have to live in. [Read full story]

I'm kicking off a series entitled simply, "Things I Learned In 2010" as a way to reflect on last year. I've been working on my battle plans and strategy for 2011 and I find it's always important to look to the past's lessons to inform the future. So I thought I'd write about my inspirations from last year before unveiling the 2011 theme.

Let me set the stage for the first topic of 'Humble Confidence'. In 2010, I saw a number of leaders (whom I respected greatly) step down from their respective roles and move on to other endeavours. These changes obviously took a while to get used to and adapt to because of the big shoes that had to be filled. People spoke of these leaders with high-regard and almost reverence. Their reputations precede them. I've heard it said that their presence is felt even when they are not physically around. I pondered what made these leaders great? What was the commonality amongst them?

Last year I also had the opportunity to give a talk about managing finances, and I invited some successful businessmen to help out as guest speakers on specific financial topics. These again were people I held with high regard, and I wanted to know what their secret was. This was definitely a change for me because I come from an environment full of negative encounters with genuinely evil people behaving very unethically when it came to business.

After a couple lunch time discussions with peers about what makes these leaders great, we concluded these were common attributes they had all possessed:

• Had a humble confidence.
• Had their facts straight, and talked straight with you.
• Had a genuine interest in you as a person, rather than treating you as a resource.
• Had unquestionable integrity.

When I was back in Canada, I was watching a lot of Dragon's Den, and there was this clip from season 3 where they interviewed the Dragon's (venture capitalists) about what made a good business pitch?


Robert Herjavec reinforces the point that successful pitches involves people with a humble confidence. These are folks who are not overly confident and seem arrogant. These folks are also not underwhelming in confidence to a point that they seem weak. The key is humble confidence and having your facts straight. Have you ever watched a presentation crash and burn because the person is spouting shaky incorrect facts, and they get destroyed in the question and answer period? Have you ever seen a leader take all the credit of his success without acknowledging his team, and you see his team members grumble under their breathe? It's an absolute train wreck.

The reason why I introduced good business pitches is because I think leadership implicitly requires you to pitch well. One of the keys to leadership is being able to articulate a vision and convincing people to follow you in that vision. I'm a firm believer in the idea of the marketplace of ideas, where ideas compete with each other, and the best ideas should survive. Being able to convince people that your idea is good is critical to your success in the marketplace of ideas.

In closing, I think one of the secrets to great leadership and success is the ability to maintain a humble confidence, no matter how far you've come, how much you've accomplished, or how big your salary is.

I'll end this quote, "For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted." - Matthew 23:12