Site News

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.

I was recently looking at my site's visitor data. I was interested to see if the addition of my delicious bookmarks on the left rail under "What I'm Reading", was helping with traffic. Looks like you folks like the feature, and traffic is up due to it.

In either case, I found some interesting data about search engine traffic. These are the top query terms that people search who end up on my site:

1. Roast Pork Tenderloin - This is my signature dish that I cook
2. Coast Capital - This is due to the epic rant I have against this credit union.
3. J2EE Sucks - I really don't enjoy coding in J2EE.
4. Chan Can Cook - Has to do with my cooking?
5. Church Mortgage Burning Ceremony - I've got an article about this.
6. Sen Zushi - My favourite restaurant.
7. Chan Productions - This site.
8. Jeremy Postale - This guy was doing a vanity search on himself, and found his name on my site.
9. Nanoose Bay Camp - A beautiful camp that my church is involved in.
10. Mighty Fish Taco - I like fish tacos?

Anyways, interesting query mix. Four of the top queries are related to food, so I guess that makes this a Foodie blog for 40% of the time.

My blog entries as of late has been sporadic at best. In an effort to at least keep the site up with fresh content, I've recently started using Delicious which is a social bookmarking service. On the left hand side of the website, I've added a "What I'm Reading" section which updates every 3 hours. Typically I blog about interesting articles that I come across anyways, so I think this is a nice addition to the site.

If you want to subscribe to my Delicious feed, you can use check out it out here (RSS / http://www.delicious.com/the_chan).

Hopefully this will make your visit here a bit more valuable even if I don't have blog posts, at least you'll have fresh bookmarks. I also wanted to try to keep track of how many articles I read a day as a metric.

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.