Site News

So, I've finished moving my photos off of Facebook and into Flickr. I've added a widget on my blog that pulls in a feed of my latest photos that I've taken. I still have two months worth of photos that still need to be put up, so it's going to be a while until I catch up. However, please enjoy checking out the pictures.

I have a total of 350 photos for now, and probably another 600 more to go. Stay tuned! If you're a Flickr user as well, drop me a note, and I'll add you to my contacts.

Flickr absolutely rules. It's probably one of my favourite Yahoo applications.

Well, I have just finished renovating my personal blog. The previous blog's design was more than three years old, so it was time for a change. In addition, the blog software I was using was becoming really dated, and I was having spam problems and such. So, I've spent the last few days upgrading the software, and there's a lot of new features that will become available.

Besides the new look-and-feel of the site, we also have web polls available now on the left hand side (scroll down a little bit). In addition, you can now participate more by rating the blog articles that I put out. More importantly, I've got more spam defences built in now, so it should be less of a pain.

Anyway, comments, feedback, and suggestions are welcome. This should conclude the downtime that we were experiencing, and I will resume regular blog postings again.

P.S. Sorry Brenton, I lost your last comment during the database upgrade, but to answer your question, I moved my host to dreamhost.com.

This is a public service announcement. We will be moving to a new web server over the weekend, so this site will be down intermittently. Our new home should offer better speeds and uptime, so this should help us serve you better. Everything should be back to normal by Monday.

If you are reading this message, that means you've made it to our new server.

Special thanks to Brenton for graciously hosting Chan Productions for the last few years.

So for the last little while, my contact form hasn't been working due to a programming bug. Unfortunately, that means that I haven't been receiving e-mails from my blog if you've been trying to contact me through the contact form. Anyway, it's working once again. Thanks Adam for pointing out this problem to me.

The other week, I was checking my web statistics, and came across a strange anomaly, apparently I had 1800 unique visitors this month. This sounded really fake. I looked through the database, and noticed that I was using a lot more space than usual. It turns out that my blog had been hit by a crap load of comment/trackback spam. This is where some jerk decides to leave comments and trackbacks with web links that promote their website.

Leaving links helps the spammer because Google will see these links and boost the spammer's webpage rank because there's more links pointing to it. Furthermore, these spam attacks are automated by computer, so it takes no time for a spammer to do this. It's a pain in the butt because I leave my blog open for all to use, and spammers come through and take advantage of this.

The spam attack is a distributed attack which means it comes from hundreds of different computers. This is annoying because you can't pinpoint the source of all the spam, and blow away that computer. Most likely, some hacker has taken over hundreds of random computers, and have them sending out spam all the time.

In either case, I cleared out 2,000 pieces of spam from my blog, and I reprogrammed a part of my blog to prevent automated spam attacks. So far it seems to have worked. However, they seem to have stepped up their attack. Now I'm getting spam through e-mail because they're using my contact form that I have on this blog. Well played spammers. This weekend I'm going to have to do some more coding to beat the spammers.

If things get worse, I'm going to upgrade my blogging software to the latest version which sports some advanced anti-spam features. Hopefully this will keep them at bay for a while. It is a digital arms race though, sooner or later, they will break through the defenses.

Anyway, hopefully I can keep up against the spammers because I want to keep my blog open and interactive as it has been for all these years.

You might have noticed the website was down for a good chunk of the weekend. The computer that hosts this website had a catastrophic hardware failure; one of their hard drives failed. In either case, it looks like I lost data from Friday and Saturday, so one of my blog articles was lost, and all of Natalie's comments for the last two days were lost (I did read them though!). Anyway, kind of frustrating. They said they knew that the hard drive has been bad for quite some time, but they didn't bother replacing it. Grrr.

Anyway, I finally got the website back up and running now. The server seems to be a bit flaky still (not in the delicious sense). Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Exactly one year ago, I started blogging on this website, and here we are at the one year anniversary. In the last year, I've had about 10,000 visitors to the website, and 95,000 hits. My average is now 57 visitors per day.

Here's a little chart showing my web traffic from September 2004 to August 2005:



The experience has definitely been quite interesting and rewarding. One of the primary goals of this blog was to bring up topics relating to current events and politics to people my age; from the responses I've received, I think I have been quite successful. I try to keep the site interesting to a diverse audience by writing about different things that range from dead serious articles to humorous articles.

Here's some other statistics of the site:

Total Blog Entries: 171
Distribution of Entries:
   41 Current Events
   29 Life
   17 Academia
   16 Church
   14 Humour
   14 Science / Tech
   11 Work
   10 History
   7 Food
   7 Money
   4 Site News
   2 Paintball
Total Number of Comments: 254
Most Frequently Commenting People:
   82 CHaN
   45 Myron
   42 Natalie
   20 Brantone
   10 Jonathan Aquino
   9 EToN
   6 Tyrone
   5 DiscoStew
Comments Per Entry: 1.49
Entries Per Week: 3.28
Entries Per Month: 14.52
Total Number of Characters in Blog: 564,900

Anyways, when I get some time, I'll probably add a few new features to the blog. Thank you all for your comments, support, and input from the last year. Thank you for all the mature thought-provoking debates. I'm quite humbled by all the kind things that my readers have said.

Here's to another year of blogging!