No, I didn’t die. Sorry to disappoint you, enemies;) I just get bored of things fairly easily and took a break from blogging.

So, why am I updating now? I got bored of my other pointless activities and decided to return to blogging again.

About the site: I cleaned up my link exchanges. Sadly, many people don’t live up to them, so all the sites that have removed me and have gotten free links from me for the past couple months are history now. If you’re interested in a link exchange, then use my contact form. Google PR 3 or higher pages only, please.

About my life: Well, now that I’m in college at St. John’s, I’m living it up. Not really living it up, but compared to how I used to live, yes. Since I’m in New York City now, it’s hard not to have fun. I’m having a little fun here, but staying out of trouble…for the most part.

I’ve seriously been thinking about moving my blog to the root directory of my domain instead of having it at this domain/wordpress. I can just put the important parts of the current root directory pages as pages in the blog that are shown on the top navigation menu. It seems like my main traffic is located at the wordpress blog, and I really don’t have much in the current root directory. The main drawbacks would be losing some backlinks that are currently linking to http://clairechiang.net/wordpress which may hurt my search engine ranking. What do you guys think?

It’s been a while since my last update, hasn’t it? Instead of updating, I’ve been wasting time experimenting with Slash My Search for my regular searching in place of google or yahoo. The small amount of money that pay originally drew my attention, because I decided that getting paid for my searches, which I do anyway, isn’t too shabby. However, a few minutes after I signed up, I became more interested in the algorithm that determines how much we get paid. They say 25 cents per hour, but I still haven’t quite figured out what qualifies as an hour. An hour of searching? An hour of having their site open? What? I’ll just use their service to search over the next few days, play with the numbers, and hopefully draw a conclusion from the numbers (for those of you who don’t know, I calculate just about everything a little too meticulously). I guess this once again proves my theory. I become interested in few things at a time but seldom continue staying interested in my new hobbies for an extended period of time.

Past time wasters:
1. Chess-live (need I say more about this?)
2. Aimless IM conversations
3. Selling junk on ebay
4. Trading junk so that I have even more useless junk in my room
5. Selling unwanted media items on Amazon
6. Making websites low in quality
7. Opening credit cards and bank accounts to get that introductory gift (or as Mr. Garbosky would say, lagniappe)
8. Make a few cents online

1. I will skip ranting about that chess server for now. Enough said in the secret to my downfall. Ok, I was probably exaggerating there, but I’ve had it with online chess.

2. I think this one also stemmed from my number one time wasting interest. Since I started chatting on chess-live, I also happened to meet some people there, who I eventually started contacting through instant messengers. Pretty soon, I was hooked.

3. After I got a paypal account, I decided that I wanted to do something with it. So, I dug out some junk that I neglected the existence of to sell. I actually made a decent profit from this if you neglect what it cost me to buy the stuff. Oh well, since the stuff I sold was completely useless to me, I’ll just think of the sales as free money.

4. Less popular media items were typically difficult to sell on ebay. I decided that I wanted to get rid of them anyway, so I joined a bunch of junk trading sites. If you’re interested, then visit my page on junk trading. Trading isn’t profitable, but it helped me build up even more garbage :). If you count the value of everything I traded and received, then I made a profit…

5. After I traded junk for more valuable junk, I decided that I could actually sell some of it. I did manage to get some more valuable things when I was lucky, such as a copy of Final Fantasy VII for playstation (which I paid a lot of switchbucs for) and some newer DVD movies that were decently priced on Amazon. I also sold some AP books from last year that I was planning to burn at an AP book burning party. Too bad (or too good?) we didn’t have that party.

6. I did have a brief interest in web design. I made a few sites and invested some money in web hosting, but most of them didn’t look too professional. I’m still kind of interested now, but I haven’t been updating my sites that often anymore, because I actually find web design kind of tedious. It’s a good way to kill time, though. Ad revenue has also been providing me with lunch money every day.

7. Ok, I’m a little crazy, but I’ve been signing up for credit cards or bank accounts from banks or stores that give me something for signing up. I now have 7 bank accounts and enough credit cards to give me enough of total credit potential that make me potentially high risk. Well, the truth is, there’s no way I would be able to pay everything back if I maxed out all my credit cards. However, I’m not planning to. Credit line is good to have, but I have a little bit of self control when it comes to money…

8. Yes, I’ve been doing little things online to make money. I know the pay per hour is only a small percentage of minimum wage, but each payment brings me an inexplicable false sense of accomplishment. Right now, it’s slash my search, but I was also posting in a number of paid forums.

Phew, it took me hours to move everything properly, but I finally moved my site to a reliable paid server. Since I had to reconfigure a couple things anyway, I switched to a better theme. Unfortunately, it will probably take at least a few more hours for my domain name servers to propagate, but hopefully that will be the end of my downtimes. Thank you, hostican! For those of you who are still using unreliable free hosting, I recommend hostican. I used them for my stempania site for a while, and have been very happy with them. The prices are some of the most reasonable I have found, and the service is top-notch. By the way, for those of you interested, use the coupon code 1dollar-3 to get three months of their base host for only $1.

Why is free hosting bad? My mommy has always taught me that nothing was free, but I still dreamed and ignored her until recently. Now I know that she was right. I, like many other victims, have spent too many hours looking for free web hosts. In fact, in the time that I spent looking for a free host, I probably could have worked and earned enough money to buy a year of quality hosting. So, what does this tell me? I simply wasted my time and still ended up spending the money necessary for paid hosting.

If you wish to use free hosting, then the free hosts that suck, such as freewebs, geocities, and angelfire are probably actually your better choices. Although they put ads on your pages and offer minimal storage and bandwidth, they’re big, have been around for a long time, and won’t all of a sudden go down or start charging you. Alternatively, the more experienced webmaster can go with 50webs or awardspace. 50webs and awardspace do not put ads on pages, but they have strict file size limits that greatly restrict your capabilities. The point is, the better a free service appears to be, the more likely it will be to not function properly, disappear, or start charging. The free hosting services that appear to not offer much may be better if they are well-known. Another indicator of a good free host is its tendency to offer a paid hosting upgrade. Usually, if a free host offers an optional paid upgrade, it’s legitimate and will always be there. Don’t be fooled by what some free hosts may claim to offer. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Here are some more examples of free hosting that sucked: 5000megs.com and 1001megs.com mysteriously disappeared literally overnight without any prior warning. I used both of them when I was first learning html and lost all my work. Good thing it wasn’t very good quality work anyway.

Let’s go back to the beginning of the story:
I was looking for a free host with the following features: No ads on pages, option of using a top level domain, FTP access, mysql databases, a decent file size limit, at least 100 mb of storage, and at least 10 GB of monthly bandwidth. This was very difficult to find in a free service, but I was stupid enough to think there would be one, so I spent hours searching. I thought I found one when I found 110mb.com (don’t use their service, it’s horrible). I was pleased during the first few hours, because it appeared to work. Only one day later, the trouble began. My site was already down. The 110mb company claimed that some “bad apples” used their service to phish ebay, but now I think that they just had some problems and tried to make up an excuse. At the time, I believed them and decided to give their service a chance, because they offered all the features that I wanted. After over a week of 100% downtime, the sites were finally up again. I was satisfied for a mere few days before the next phase of major downtime. They claimed that all the sites were being moved to more reliable servers in Europe, so I was once again patient in hopes that the sites would be faster and stable in the near future. This occurred a week or two ago, and my site has still been down quite frequently. As if all the downtime and empty promises of improvement were not enough, 110mb.com is now practically becoming a paid service. They now want to charge for the use of top level domains, which nobody should pay for, because their service simply sucks. Once again, don’t let the silly numbers in front of storage and bandwidth offered fool you. I think I’ve learned my lesson this time.

Do not sign up with any free hosting plan that claims to offer you a bunch of great services. They most likely won’t give you what they promise. Even if they do try to offer such services, as they expand, they will either start charging, putting ads on your pages, or disappear without notice. If you insist on using free hosting, then sign up for 50webs of awardspace if you are a more advanced user or geocities, freewebs, or angelfire if you want a quick start.

Spam has always been a problem in wordpress blogs. I used to moderate all comments manually to prevent nonsense comments. However, this has been getting more annoying since I’m receiving 5-10 spam comments per day now.

Is wordpress spam also a problem for you? If it is, then here are some plugins to help regulate it. Of course, none of these are foolproof, but they do get rid of most of the spam comments.

Akismet is probably the most important spam killer. It has so far been pretty good at accurately detecting spam comments and filtering most of them out so I do not have to manually. It is definitely an essential for every blog.

Another one I am using is challenge. Challenge displays a math problem that the commenter has to solve each time he/she wants to comment. This probably also reduces spam, because chances are, few people are bored enough to do that many problems, and I don’t think spam bots can read the questions. Apologies to those who can’t do these problems. No offense, but I feel that such basic arithmetic should be something that everyone should know.

There is also a comment authorization plugin that I’m thinking about using. It sends an email with a unique url to the commenter, which he/she has to click on in order for the comment to be accepted. Please vote in the poll below to help me determine whether I should use this one or the math problem one. I would also appreciate comments explaining why the one chosen is preferred.

If you do not have site statistics built in with your web hosting provider, then I would recommend google analytics for very detailed statistics. When I first started this blog, I just used a freewebs counter to count page views. However, this did not tell me how many pages each visitor viewed, how many new/repeat visitors I had, or where my main sources were. Therefore, a couple days after I made this blog, I started using google analygics. Here are some of my statistics for those of you who want to see how google analytics is like:

Google analytics tells me how many of my visitors were new and how many were repeats. I seem to get mostly new visitors, but a few loyal visitors are returning. This is good in the sense that a lot of different people are looking at my blog but bad in the sense that not that many are bookmarking it and coming back later. Oh well, the main reason most poeple visit sites is for information. Once they get that information, they usually leave…

My traffic is still very unstable. If I write an interesting technical article and sumbit it to digg and reddit, then I get a lot of hits for a few hours. Once the story gets a few hours old, the visitors decline. I guess I still need more updated information if I want more visitors from those two sites. I have also been losing traffic since I have been posting less in bloggerforum. My signature was a link to my blog, and I often posted links to my blog with relevant information to certain threads.

Most of my visitors are still from the United States. This doesn’t surprise me that much, because a lot of the major computer nerds are from here.

It looks like I get links from various sources. The two big ones are digg and reddit, because they get lots of visitors themselves. I’m guessing that most of the direct requests are repeat visitors who have bookmarked me. Posting on bloggerforum and 110mb forums have also helped me a bit. It’s nice to see that I have a variety of sources, because 22.12% are still from other places. I’m guessing those places include some other forums, my xanga, and my main site.

Pretty graph! People are entering my blog at many different posts

I found this interesting. Statistically, over 60% of all internet users use Internet Explorer while a little over 30% use Firefox. Most of the other browsers are almost never used, for example, Opera is used less than 1% of the time. It’s interesting how since most of my visitors are webmasters, internet explorer is less popular. Firefox is the most popular browser among webmasters, because it actually is not only easy to use, but safer. Most of the more technologically experience people use Firefox.

Also interesting how my main audience is more likely to use an operating system other than Windows. Over 95% of all internet users use windows, but only 83.99% of my visitors were using it. Windows actually does suck, but I’m just using it because it has basically become the standard and is more compatible.

HAHAHAHAHA! I can’t believe 8.14% were still using dialup.