Chan's Personal Blog - Site News

Flickr Photostream

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 22:50:57 -0800

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.

Site Renovations

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 23:59:00 -0800

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.

Server Move

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 15:27:45 -0800

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.

Contact Form Fixed

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:29:12 -0800

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.

Begin The Spam Wars 2

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 23:30:12 -0700

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.

Server Crash

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Sun, 07 May 2006 23:51:17 -0700

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.

One Year Anniversary of Blog

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 23:14:28 -0700

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!

Begin The Spam Wars

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 23:59:00 -0700

After happily blogging for 8 months, I finally got hit by comment spam on my blog. In the back of my mind, that was always a threat but somehow I avoided getting hit by it because my blogging system is relatively old. My blogging system wasn't very popular at the time, so no one targetted it with spam.

For those who don't know what comment spam is, it's when someone leaves an unwanted advertisement in your blog's comments. A lot of times, the process of comment spamming can be automated by building a computer program to do it for you. There are several reasons why some jerk would want to do it. Firstly, it boosts their own website's ranking in search engines. In general, the more links pointing to a website, the higher the site's search ranking will be. This is a huge deal since 80% of people use search engines to find sites. The second reason is that it's free advertising. The advertisement usually contains a link to the spammer's business website or something, so that's another way he/she can attract visitors to the site.

In either case, two weeks ago, my website has been desecrated by the invasion of a comment spammer. I deleted the comment, but they returned a week later. So, begin the Spam Wars we must. I have a war chest of anti-spam tools, but the spammers also have sophisticated tools to cancel out those tools. It is essentially an arms race. It sucks how some people take advantage of open content websites like blogs, where anyone can express their ideas and comments.

In either case, I'm going to slowly step up my anti-spamming procedures. Each time the enemy strikes, I will kick it up a notch.

It is on! You messed with the wrong hacker! In the words of Yoda, "Destroy the [spammers], we must."

1,000th Visitor

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Sat, 01 Jan 2005 23:39:50 -0800

Today Chan Productions has hit an important milestone; we had our 1,000th visitor to the site today. A fitting milestone for a new year. Anyways, a big thanks to all my regular readers, I put quite a lot of time writing for this site, and I have been rewarded greatly by your words of encouragement and input.

Anyways, the new year should be filled with tales of interest, intrigue, humour, drama, and sadness. If you're a regular viewer, please leave a comment, or maybe ask what type of articles you would like to see more of. I'd love to know who actually reads my articles, and what works and what doesn't. I'm still trying to figure out who my American viewer is, you login consistently, but I have no idea who you are. (I can track users by country of origin.)

Have a happy new year all! The journey continues...

Chan Productions Goes Gold

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Sun, 26 Sep 2004 23:35:58 -0700

Well, the beta test for Chan Productions is over, and the site is ready for the public. Most of the major bugs have been worked out. This site should work on Internet Explorer 5.5+, Mozilla, Firefox, and Safari. Special thanks to all my beta testers who checked out the site for me. Many thanks to Brenton for hosting my site.

Personal Site Launch

nospam@example.com (CHaN) — Sun, 12 Sep 2004 20:31:00 -0700

Well, I've finished the personal side of my website, and it's up and running now. It's suprising that writing content for the site took almost as long as designing and coding up the site. If you find any problems with the site, please contact me about it. Bare with me as I am a noobie at blogging. So... sit back, and enjoy the show.