Wangjianshuo's Blog

Events (in Shanghai) that affect my life (and others')

Wayback Wangjianshuo’s Blog

Posted on October 2, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

I didn’t remember I have blog interface like this onNov 25, 2002, and I have no idea about the first version of Wangjianshuo’s blog like this: Sep 22, 2002. I even have page like this on Mar 27, 2003. All these interface looks so nice to me. I wonder if they are even better than my current design. :-D

Thanks to the WayBackMachine, the Internet Archive to keep record of the history of the website for me, otherwise, I guess the design will got lost permenantly and I will never have a chance to review those old designs. The Internet Archive even keep almost all the link clickable and you can see the content of the whole website on that day!

Font Changed to Bigger

Posted on September 11, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

After the forecast of Upcoming Change in Font Size, I uploaded the new CSS to my web server. I have formed a habbit to link to this CSS file whenever I create a new web page, so the most basic features of my style becomes handy. These features include:

Verdana font
Font size of 12pt (the default size in IE and most browsers). It was 10pt before.
Colorful Headings.
Margin on the left and on the right

Do you like the new design?

More than Font Size

Besides the change in font size, I made some minor changes to other parts for sake of usability improvement. This the second usability improvement on this site (first Usability Improvement). I conducted Top Usability Mistakes of Wangjianshuo’s Blog) research one year and a quarter ago. I hope the site keep involving itself.

Navigation Bar

I changed the navigation bar a little bit so when you click Home and navigate to Home page, the Home does not has a link, implying you are on the page. The same applies to Archives, Directory, and Map. What is the usability guideline behind this?

Visibility – By observing, users should know where they are and what is the possible actions they can perform

Wangjianshuo’s BBS Launched

Posted on September 11, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

I am cautious to open a BBS on my site. One month ago, I posted: Shall I Open a Shanghai BBS. At that time, I still didn’t decide to open one. The major barrier is, I don’t think I have any spare time to operate a BBS. As everyone is aware of, to maintain a good BBS is not easy, even tougher than running a blog.

However, with friends’ encouragement, I finally step out to open one. It is to forester more voices and more topics beside the “Wangjianshuo monopoly” on my blog. :-D

More Topics, More Voices

After writing for this blog for two years, I (successfully) created a community around my ideas, my observations and topics I am interested. I will always cherish this community and keep it unchanged.

Meanwhile, with more and more visitors coming everyday, people find their questions and their needs are well beyond the scope I can touch. Imagine, there are constantly 110,000 page views every single day, 7 days a week on this site. There are all valid human actions. If you count Google bots, automatic reading machines (like RSS readers), hit rate is sometimes as high as 260,000 hits/day. Imagine how I can cover all the topics these huge number of visitors want. People are asking “I wanted to know this but I cannot find a right article on your site to post, so….” and “….so I am writing this email to you…”, or “…so I am posting here but it maybe out of topic….”.

Taking that into consideration, I am opening a new forum for people who are reading this site, who stumbled to this site via Google, to share, to help each other.

I Won’t be too Active on BBS, Though

Although I opened the BBS, please don’t expect me to be active in the BBS. I am not full time on this (if you consider that I have a very busy job to do already). To make sure you are not disappointed, I will keep the rule that I WON’T answer posts in the BBS. I expect my friends and frequent readers to help people with their questions. If I found some questions that I cannot help answering it, I will answer it in my blog. I will still monitor all comments on my blog as before. Does it make sense?

Moderates

The good news is, earthmilk, and some other great readers have accepted my invitation to be be the moderates for each board. I bet they can help to make this BBS a great success.

Risks

Is there any risk to open a forum? Yes, surely there is. When I open a BBS, as a responsiable service provider, I have to make sure the data is well maintained. Nobody wants to post to a forum that disappear after one or two year. If the traffic is high, the maintaince cost well worthes it. However, if not many people come to the BBS, to maintain the forum (weekly backup the data, daily check for new posts – although this is not mine job…) will be a burden.

If it does happen, let’s say after three months, I may consider removing the links from the navigation bar of this site but still keep the data. As the usability guideline suggested, any new function is a road block for users to find the other functions. If I want to close the BBS in the future – I keep the right to do so, I will post a notice three month in advance so people can back up their articles and data. You see, to be a professional provider is not easy.

Upcoming Change in Font Size

Posted on September 10, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

I have planned this for a long time, from the first day of this blog till now. I am going to change the current fixed font size (10pt) of this blog to a blog with relative font (100%, 120%…) size.

This is a change according to the suggestion of this article: Let Users Control Font Size.

I didn’t change since I used MovableType’s original CSS and the change made the page almost unreadable. Now, with two years gradual change, I will launch the bigger font version tomorrow, exactly at the first day of the third year of my blog.

Changes

The first change you notice is, the font in this blog becomes bigger. Now it is Verdana with 10pt in size. From tomorrow, it will change to 12pt Verdana if you are using Intenet Explorer’s default setting. This, I hope, give people better reading experience.

The second change is, you can control the font of all elements on this website. You can point to Text Size on View menu of IE and select one of the 5 text sizes: Smallest, Smaller, Medium, Larger, Largest. According to the size you select, the font size of the website changes. This feature was disabled in my current version since I explicitly specify the font size.

Feedback

Give me some feedback on how you like it. I hope the change is a positive move for most of readers. I am using this site as a usability project that continue to strike for the best usability possible.

Shall I Open a Shanghai BBS

Posted on August 10, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

Whenever I meet any tough decision related to this site, I turn to my readers to help me.

I am thinking of open a BBS to offer visitors another place to raise question. Thus if anyone has any question about Shanghai, they can just create a new topic. Currently, they have to select a topic I have created and post it there, or it will be off topic comment.

I have setup a forum at http://home.wangjianshuo.com/bbs, however, I didn’t kick off it yet. I know to start a forum is easy and to maintain is not. More efforts should be put into the forum to maintain it, to reply and to moderate it. So, I still not decided it yet. If I open it one day, it means I have committed it to keep it in the long run. The original PVGBBS (Pudong Airport BBS) was not a success story for me. The volume is not good. After my server migration, I didn’t move the old data to this new site yet. This is a sample of the commitment I have to make to run a BBS. Once a post is posted onto a forum, the post owner and the site owner share the ownership of the post. The site owner is expected (although not required by law) to take care of the post and to keep the URL to the post unchanged – in case there are references on other site to this entry. At least, the site owner should keep the post for reasonable long time. This is the responsibility the owner should have.

blogcn.com did very bad recently – to lose customer’s blogs and comments and shut down the service frequently. I am very careful for the decision to run hosted service (like BBS), since I don’t want to be another example of blogcn.com. Responsibility is yours no matter how big (like a BSP) or how small (like my BBS) you are.

P.S. 1

I am very surprised to see 37 comments on my last entry: Why I Don’t Have an English Name. Wow. A hot topic!

P.S. 2

If you see me going online, offline, online, offline, …. on MSN Messenger these days, don’t be surprised. I am in an environment where the wireless LAN is not stable. It seems to be running on a sin(x) curve. The indicator went from Low, to Very Low, to Limited or no connectivity, to No wireless network detected, and then to Limited or no connectivity, back to Very low, Low…. at a cycle of 3 minutes. So does my MSN Messenger. It automatically logon when network resumes and log off when connection lost.

P.S. 3

After several weeks in a big project, I found my planning skills greatly increased. I wasn’t able to plan things that is 3 days ahead, now I have to think about what I (and the implementation team) are doing the same day half a year later (that is 2005). Great. It is important to see progress everyday.

P.S. 4

Beijing is hot and wet these days, just like the rain season in Shanghai, if not hotter or wetter.

P.S. 5

I will move to Beijing Shangri-la Hotel from tomorrow. Byebye, Ressainanse, my favorite hotel in Beijing.

Change in Global Navigation

Posted on July 17, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

This page is just for my personal reference in case one day I want to roll back to the original version.

The original version:

The new version:

This change is to give higher visibility of photo and map section of this site. What is your feedback on this change?

Cannot Post Comment on this Site?

Posted on July 15, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

Some reader reported that he/she cannot post comment onto this site. They get error message:

Comment Submission Error

Your comment submission failed for the following reasons:

You are not allowed to post comments.

Chances are, I have banned your IP address so you cannot post.

“What? Why ban me? I am a good netizen!”

Sorry if it happens to you. I intended to ban spammers who are in the same IP range of you. When I get any comment spam, I will remove it proactively and I will use the MovableType’s built-in IP Banning feature to ban future comment or trackbacks from the same IP range.

This is not a perfect solution. It will ban good guys like you and bad guys together. If this does happen, please drop me an email and tell me your IP address and I will lift it. I believe spammers don’t have time to write to me since they are busy posting to other blogs when they find this one does not work for them.

Meanwhile, I posted the following message to the error page so it is less confusing when people see this message:

Help on “You are not allowed to post comments.”.

If you post comment and see error message like above, chances are, I have put your IP block into my banned list. I take several minutes everyday to clean up spam comment onto my site everyday and I always take the extra mile to add the IP arrange of the spammer so they cannot post spam to my site in the future. However, this is not a perfect solution because it will ban many good citizens along with the spammer.

If you are my reader, sorry for the inconvenience. Would you please drop me an email to and let me know your IP address. (You can find your IP address at http://whatismyipaddress.com/) and I will remove your IP arrange from my banned list.
If you are a spammer (or marketer in your term), sorry that this is not the right place for you. Chances are, you don’t have time to contact me since you have tens or hundreds of website to go to post your spam. I suggest you to change post your spam comment from another computer with different IP address. I can guarantee you that I will ban the new IP address when I find it out

Update: I did Banned Many Good Readers

In five hours after I post this entry, I have got two readers to report the ban by mistake. I have lifted the ban. Keep sending me the unban request and I will process them ASAP. Sorry for banning you, good guys and welcome back.

My Own Web Based RSS Reader

Posted on July 14, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

Check my own web based RSS reader. It is based on Feed on Feeds. Let me add more explaination to this test tomorrow.

Update:

Feed on Feeds is a very nice tool written in PHP. It did some hack on the code so it caches the content into HTML in the RSS folder under archives folder in my website. I am adding more blogs I check everyday on to the list.

I run a schedule to update the blog entires every day so it always contains the latest posts from the blogs.

Thank God. Links 2.0 Finally Worked

Posted on May 11, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

Thanks to God. After fighting with the “Premature end of script headers” error in Links 2.0 for the whole night, it finally suddenly worked. Before that, it was always 500 Internal Server Error.

Now all the links directory and the related entry section of this website back to normal again. The migration is a long process. The Links 2.0 took longest time. Anyway, it started to work just now.

Migrating Scripts

Posted on April 18, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

This post is the insider information about the scripts used in this website. It is recorded for my future reference and may serve as inspiring tips for others running the same site.

Content of my old /scripts/ folder

[ads] – personal advertisement server so I can serve advertisement in the Featured section of my previous design. I decided not to use this for my new site since Google’s AdSense is a good one. It provides the functionality of Alternative Ad when a google Ad cannot be served. I can point it to my AD page to serve my own ad. Done

[air] – this part was written in ASP to serve China Domestic Flight information. I am planning to migrate it, by the end of April.

[bbs] – this is a BBS for my high school classmates. There is no link on any page of this site but my classmates. It is written in ASP so I have to leave it on the old server. I am redirecting all pages to the old server on CompanyCN. Done

[bill] – Ops. What is this? An empty folder. I forgot why I created it.Done

[commentsubscribe] – Oh. This is great feature for people to subscribe to comment thread. I am going to migrate it this month, so the subscribe this comment thread function will start to work after I put the check box on each page for so long time.

Updated April 20, 2004

Since the CommentSubscribe function has been migrated from PHP to CGI, I installed the CGI version this time. It is good news for me.

[google] – I tired to put all Google AD script code into a JavaScript file in this folder, but it didn’t seem to work. After migrating to SQL database, rebuild is fast so I won’t hesitate to rebuild the whole site now. I don’t need it.

[Hello] – folder for me to test new scripts such as “hello world”.

[links] – This was very important scripts for me to build the Yahoo!-like directory. It stopped working on iPowerWeb host. I am working hard to find out the reason.

[mailer] – Attempted to use this Mailer to send email, but failed. After changing server, sending email is very easy. So I don’t need it.

[mangle] – Mangle is the code name for the China Domestic Flight information project. It is changed to “air” folder so it is no longer useful.

[map] – Wow. This is an important application. The map view of Shanghai map. It attracted half of the visit before. It was written in ASP and I have re-write it in Perl.

[MTcn] – This is another MovableType installation to host pages for Wendy. She used this copy to maintain her blog.

[photo] – I used ImageMagick to create thumb view of all pictures on my computer. Since the new server does not support ImageMagick, I cannot use it any longer. Maybe I can create offline and upload the results.

[php] – Something like Hello, a place for me to learn PHP.

[pmwiki] – an installation of PMWiki. Not sure if I can still install it onto the new server.

[point] – another alias for the air.

[postcard] – scripts to send post card from this server. It is simple but useful. I will try to install it.

[proxy] – Scripts to try proxy.

[sendtofriends] – send a page to friend. Now MovableType support it.

[sms] – Scripts to send SMS to me via website.

[thanksforcomment] – a slash screen to show the big “Thank you for your comment” logo. You may have some impression of it if you follow this blog long enough. I don’t use it now.

[today] – Post on the same day of last year. Retired.

[usemod] – another Wiki engine. Retired.

[wap] – Use my WAP-enabled mobile to see comments on this site.

[webcam] – scripts to dynamically find out the source IP of my webcam. Retired after I found VICP.NET.

[wiki] – the OpenWiki engine.

Photo Index of My Blog

Posted on February 11, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

I have created a photo index of all the pictures shown on this site, so you can check the site by photos.

Year of 2003

Year of 2004

I hope you enjoy the pictures I took. It can also be called with the fasional word: Moblog.

BTW, my favorite photographic blog is: ziboy

Newsletter Switched to Yahoo! Groups

Posted on February 11, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

In the following week, I will send out emails to the 300 subscribers of Wangjianshuo’s Blog Update to nofity the change of the newsletter.

Dear Reader of Wangjianshuo’s Blog,

I am writing to notify you about the recent changes in the Wangjianshuo’s Blog Update Newsletter, which you have subscribed at http://home.wangjianshuo.com

As an effort to protect your privacy and give you more control over your subscription, like unsubscribing and changing deliver frequency, I have decided to switch from the built-in MovableType notification function to Yahoo! Groups.

This letter is to invite you to join the new mail list.

You are NOT added to the new list automatically. If you don’t want to receive daily update from Wangjianshuo’s Blog, NO action is required. Please kindly discard this letter and I’ll remove your email from my record.

If you still want to be notified when a new entry of my blog comes online, please kindly follow the instruction included in this email to confirm your subscription. I will be very happy to see your “renewal?of the subscription.

FAQ about the change can be found at http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20040212_newsletter_switched_to_yahoo_groups.htm.

Thanks for your attention.

Jian Shuo Wang

http://home.wangjianshuo.com

Frequent Asked Questions are listed below.

Q: Tell me More about the Change.

Providing an update to readers about new entries is a good way to keep strong connections between a website and its readers. I started the newsletter, called Wangjianshuo’s Blog Update, from April, 2003. At the very beginning, I used the notification function of MovableType to send notifications. However, the lack of unsubscribe function is a big pain for me. My effort to add unsubscribe functions didn’t work well due to the manual administration. I don’t want to miss any unsubscribe request but don’t have the time to check everyday.

Later, I changed to the notification list of Links 2.0. There are still some problems with the time-out error. Anyway, I decided to find a better solution. Now, Yahoo! Groups is the best based on my research. So there is a change.

Q: Why Not Add the Existing Subscribers Directly Instead of Sending Invitation?

I don’t need a large number of members in my subscription list. It is meaningless. I just want to provide the right information that is helpful.

This is a good chance for people who are no longer interested to leave the list gracefully. I guess more than 30% of recipients won’t spend the effort to subscribe. That means, the value of the newsletter is less than two clicks of mouse. Then I respect their choice. Let’s save bandwidth of the over-loaded Internet together.

Q: I didn’t Receive Updates in the Last One or Two Months. Why?

Having the problems above said, I hesitate to send more updates in the last one and half month. I felt bad when I got bouncing email saying: “Who on hell are you?” or “If you dare to spam me again…”

People know how hardly I fought against spam. I have zero tolerance for people to call me myself a spammer. It is true that they entered their email address into my site but they forgot it, or someone else entered their emails (I don’t think it often happens). So I decide to utilize the email confirmation function of Yahoo! Groups so this won’t happen. From today, I have resumed the daily update to the new list. So subscribe and get synchronized.

Q: Is there any disadvantages in Yahoo! Groups?

Yes. Sometimes advertisements are inserted into the email. Well. It is the cost of a free service.

Q: Will You Change List Provider Again In the Future?

Maybe. If MovableType 3.0 provides more features, I am switch back.

Q: Can I Invite my Friends to Join this List Too?

Sure. It is appreciated if you recommend the site to your friend. However, please ask them to join by themselves instead of subscribing on behalf of them.

Q: I Haven’t Received the Inviation Yet. Can I Renew?

Yes. Just use the Subscribe form on every page (including this page) to subscribe yourself, even if you don’t receive an invitation.

Q: Other Question?

PmWiki Successfully Installed on Windows 2000

Posted on January 3, 2004 by Jian Shuo Wang

I finally decided to use PmWiki as my Wiki engine, just like choosing MovableType for my blog. Before choosing PmWiki, I also successfully installed UseModWiki and OpenWikie on my server, and did some research on MediaWiki. OpenWiki are not so reliable since I frequently meet 500 Server Internal Error。 UseMod is definitely a good choice since the revision function works greatly immediately after installation, but the documentation part is not as good as PmWiki. I specially like the WikiTrails feature, which is not available from other engines.

Environment

Windows 2000

Internet Information Server

I hosted my site with my ISP. They have configured PHP for me already.

Install PHP on Windows

Although I didn’t do it for this installation, I have successfully installed PHP engine onto my Windows XP.

Download PHP binary for Windows IIS at PHP‘s website: http://cn2.php.net/get/php-4.3.4-installer.exe/from/a/mirror
After download, directly double click to run the Windows Installer program.
Click Next>, Next> and Next>…. accept all the default setting, except the SMTP screen.
Click OK to confirm the success of the PHP installation.

Well. PHP is successfully installed. It is easier and smoother than I expected.

Download PmWiki Code

Go to http://www.pmichaud.com/pub/pmwiki/ to download the latest version of PmWiki. I downloaded the pmwiki-0.5.26.zip (153k).
Extract the files into a folder.
Upload the whole folder to the web server. There is even no need to edit the configuration files before it works. I am using http://home.wangjianshuo.com/scripts/pmwiki/ as the destination folder.
After upload, just visit the URL of the file pmwiki.php. It is http://home.wangjianshuo.com/scripts/pmwiki/pmwiki.php for my case. It simplely works well. This surprised me a lot

Configure PmWiki

Although it does not take any extra effort to let PmWiki up and running, some important steps are neccessary for PmWiki to work on Windows flatform.

Diff and Patch

By default, everything in PmWiki works on Windows except the page revisions (sample). This problem is not obvious, so you may need the following reproduce steps:

Open any page in your installation.
Make any changes by clicking the Edit Page and save it.
Click Page Revisions at the end of the page. It should show the difference betwee the two versions. However, most user will see blank lines and some Restore links. The Restore link does not work since all the versions are shown as the final version – the history of the editing is not perserved as the sample revision page shows.

Solution

DiffAndPatchForWindows offers some directions to solve the problem. PmWiki relies on external command of diff and patch for version control. Neither of the command are natively available on Windows. The easiest way, as stated in the article, is to download GNUWin32 diff and patch tools.

Download the two Windows setup files. The SourceForge site of GNUWin32 offers too many choices and it is not strait forward for our installation propose. This is the shortcut:
- diffutils
- patch
Double-click each of them to run the setup program.
Accept all the default settings during the setup.
You should find the following files under C:\program files\GnuWin32\bin folder, if you used the default setting:

46,080 cmp.exe

92,160 diff.exe

46,080 diff3.exe

926,123 libiconv-2.dll

72,261 libintl-2.dll

117,760 patch.exe

48,793 regex.dll

51,712 sdiff.exe
Upload these files to a folder on your server. I used /scripts/bin. Actually, sdiff.exe, diff3.exe and cmp.exe are optional. The other three .dll are required for diff.exe and patch.exe to run.
Create a local.php at the same folder as PmWiki.php if it is not there yet.

$SysDiffCmd = ‘E:\\Customer\\Wangjianshuo\\scripts\\bin\\diff.exe ‘;

$SysPatchCmd = ‘E:\\customer\\wangjianshuo\\scripts\\bin\\patch.exe –silent’;

Replace the my path with your own path.
Now your blog should support the revision feature. Please note that all pages modified before diff and patch will permennantly lose the function of roll-back since the diff history was not preserved.

Chinese Support

Chinese is not completely supported in PmWiki, so does other Asia languages. It is because PmWiki, like other Wiki engines, use \xB0 as new line seperator, which falls into the Chinese GB2312 encoding area. So characters with \xB0 as the first byte will be considered as newline and cause problem. Here is the solution (in Chinese).

After the applying the patch, I also downloaded the interface localizatino pack.

Do you know why they are using i18n? It is Internationalization. There is exactly 18 characters between i and n and few people want to spell it out. LOL.

My Alexa Traffic Ranking Improved

Posted on December 29, 2003 by Jian Shuo Wang

My Alexa web traffic ranking improves. Today, wangjianshuo.com, including both home… and www… is ranked as the 92,392nd largest site in terms of traffic. It is the first time it jumps into top 100,000.

screen-alexa.rank-92392.png

Credit: Alexa.com

If the trend continues, the site will be top 30,000 largest site in three months. :-D

This is my current ranking (may be different than the one I stated above)

Alexa Toolbar

The positive change is not reflecting the real situation. The page view does not improve dramatically. The truth is, I installed the Alexa toolbar on my computer. As the most frequent visitor of the site, my visits greatly impacted the ranking. The lower a site’s rank is, the lower the accuracy the rank is. Don’t take it seriously.

Directory Improvement

Yesterday, when I am home alone, I dig into Perl scripts and finally managed to replace my old MTRelatedEntries plugin with MTLinksRelatedEntries I wrote.

I have more than 400 entries and there are about 70 entries for each category. The links listed under Related Entries section are no longer related to each other since the current category is too generic. So I implemented Links 2.0 and built a directory. In this hierarchy, entries can be put into smaller categories and there is only two to seven entries per category. Items in the same category are related to each other better.

After the category is built, I put other links under the same category to the Related Entries section. I hope people get better experience with this site after the change.

Directory Added

Posted on December 12, 2003 by Jian Shuo Wang

My readers and I suffer greatly from the navigation structure of this website. The two to three years of continuous adding content to the site left hundreds of pages of content with no particular order. The current category feature of MovableType is not strong enough to hold the 400 articles – I cannot add more categories since the top navigation bar is almost full and the number of entries in a category keeps increasing.

Today, I claim the end of this nightmare. I included the hirechy directory into the website. I spent some time to put all the articles into the directory and sub directories. The directory makes it clearer to me and easier to find a particular article. What do you think?

I choose Gossamer Threads Inc.‘s Link 2.0. It is a great product! I love the authoring and publishing mechanism instead of rendering the pages on the fly. MovableType and Link 2.0 are both cute.

In the next few days, I will integrate the two sites (home… and www… together seamlessly with the directory service and deploy the new navigation bar (with only directory, forum links).

I believe this directory to my website is just like I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid to the LOUVRE.

Credit: I.M. Pei’s Pyramid

Why I Added Google Adsense to My Blog

Posted on October 22, 2003 by Jian Shuo Wang

You may discover that from today (Oct 22, 2003), the Google Adsense begin to appear on my website. It is typically a banner like the one shown under the Ad section on this page.

Experiment

I am just doing experiment to see if the Google’s newest technology works on my site. So far, the result is satisfactary. The advertisement served is pretty relavent to the content of my page and is not that annoying.

Ad Placement

Actually, I hate to bring the advertisement into this site, since I am passionate to provide more information about Shanghai and life here just because I love to do it. I am just conducting the experiment to see how it works and how much revenue it will bring. :-) I’d like to keep the banner to the second half of my content – after the article I created, so it should still be acceptable. What do you feel?

I tried to use all the layout of Google Adsense:

468 x 60 Banner
120 x 600 Skyscraper
728 x 90 Leaderboard
300 x 250 Inline rectangle

Finally, I choosed the smallest one – the 468 x 60 banner which serve only up to two sites. It looks more decent and fits into the design of my pages.

Andersj mentioned the idea to show the advertisement only on certain pages older than one month, so frequently readers always get fresh and ad-free content, and people from search engine will be served with content relative ads.

Still Expect Some USD for the hosting

To be honest, I still expecting to see money coming in from Google Adsense. At least, it may pay off for the domain names, the disk space. I always feel lack of disk space when I what to share something, like the Alcatel OT715 Mobile Software Suite. It does not make such sense for me to pay everything just to help others. :-)

Usability Improvement

Posted on May 14, 2003 by Jian Shuo Wang

My readers are telling me that the site is simple and easy to use. Here are some samples:

Jian Shuo Wang’s blog – SARS and life in China, including photos and interesting conversations. Nice simple design too. — kim gilmour

I found out your web site seriuos and well arranged ,simple but efficient.. — David

I am very happy to know that. Want to know the reason why this site is easy to use? Why the design is simple but effective? The answer is, I am interested in usability and has paid a lot of effort especially on usability of this site.

Added weekday to date

Under each title (in the headline of homepage or in any individual article), there is a date of the article. I changed the date from the format of “May 10, 2003 10:38 AM” to “Saturday, May 10, 2003 10:38 AM”. Note that weekday was added to the date.

People are more interested to see whether the entry is created today or yesterday – which is more easier to identify by weekday, instead of day of the month.

MORE NEWS to PREVIOUS HEADLINES

On the homepage, I changed the title of the second section from MORE NEWS to PREVIOUS HEADLINES

The first action after a reader read the headlines is, I bet, to find out previous headlines. So the term “PREVIOUS HEADLINES” may reflects the task better.

Added “Other entries (complete list)”

In the PREVIOUS HEADLINES section, I list 5 most recent entries. There is a big usability problem with this design since people will get very confused in the following two situations:

1. The user are not interested in these 5 articles and want to read more

2. or the reader has visited the site 10 days before and interested in the headline, but now the headline is removed from both the current headline or the 5 previous headline. Where to find it?

So I added “?Read: Other entires (complete list)” and give the archive page more exposure.

Added “Last 20 comments”

Under the COMMENTS section, I listed 7 comments. But any list of recent entries, just like the previouew headlines section, needs a link that leads longer list. So people can find their comment even it is removed from the list on the homepage.

Top Usability Mistakes of Wangjianshuo’s Blog

Posted on May 6, 2003 by Jian Shuo Wang

Since I have plenty of time, I reviewed Jakob Neilson’s Top Ten Web-Design Mistake of 2002. I am very interested in usability and even delivered training and speech on usability in some events. I had paid a lot of attention in usability of tihs site, but still find 6 mistakes in my current design. Read the article – the cartoon pictures are so cute!

PROBLEM: Horizontal Scrolling.

Yeah. I made this mistake. Even on 1024×768 resolution screen, there is still a little horizontal scrolling bar. It will be worse on 800×600 screen. It is because of some long titles. According to usability guidelines, the “Also on this site” section (with a lot of photo icons) are not effective as “Related Entries” section, since the later offers more content related links, instead of links in each category. I finally decided to remove this section from the individual article pages. So say good by to this section and the annoying horizontal scrolling bar.

To continue to remove the horizontal scrolling bar, I have deleted two cells from the search bar.

In addition, I added the category page to the end of the “Related Entry Section” as the following bullitins:

Read other 23 articles in SARS category, or
Return to the homepage of Wnangjianshuo’s blog

This is the sample to provide the user the information they need at the right time. It makes sense to tell the reader to look at the home page or other similiar pages after they have completed reading the page.

WELL DONE: JavaScript in Links

I didn’t use any JavaScript in links in this site. I seldom use “TARGET=_BLANK”. So most of the links will load the content in the current window. Press Shift key when clicking the link will load the target page in new browser.

NO RATE: No Prices

I didn’t make this mistake since I don’t sell anything on this site. Everything is free so I don’t need to put a sticker to every article to say: “Hey, the price for reading this is $0!”. However, inspired by the idea of selling T-Shirt on BigWhiteGuy.com, I may try to put some printed pictures online – with price about $12 – $15. How do you think about it? It is sure that no people will buy, just for fun!

WELL DONE: Inflexible Search Engines

I used to use master.com’s search engine – it is a great service with very quick update (interval of 72 hours by default). It even the “Look and Feel” customization. Very cool!

However, I finally decided to switch to Google Free Search. Although the search interval is about 1 month and there is no template based customization, it offers flexibility of typo correction (try search for goverment? It will offer the corrected search term government) and the order are prioritized by Google’s magic algrithm. So, nothing will change.

Inside Wangjianshuo.com II

Posted on March 25, 2003 by Jian Shuo Wang

I wrote Inside Wangjianshuo.com in Oct 2002. It is more on the operational side – the venders I am using and the architectes of the domains and websites. Recently, I reviewed some very good articles on site building. I’d like to share my experience with this site – anyway, it is a PageRank 5 website now, according to Google.

Content of the site

home.w…com: 133 pages

www.w…com: 207 pages

Data source: visit log at Feb 28, 2003

Average number of hits per visitor (HpV)

Oct 2002: 3.885

Nov 2002: 3.933

Dec 2002: 5.304

Jan 2003: 3.669

Feb 2003: 3.212

Nov 2003: 2.820

Dec 2003: 3.077

Jan 2004: 3.083

Top visited page

Oct 2002:

home.wangjianshuo.com/ 14.26% 669

www.wangjianshuo.com/personal/places/pudongairport/ 5.58% 262

www.wangjianshuo.com/

Nov 2002:

home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20020923_net_send_yet_another_type_of_spam.htm 4.87% 839

home.wangjianshuo.com/ 4.56% 786

www.wangjianshuo.com/personal/places/pudongairport/ 3.90% 671

Dec 2002:

www.wangjianshuo.com/personal/places/pudongairport/ 3.92% 880

home.wangjianshuo.com/ 3.39% 763

home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20020923_net_send_yet_another_type_of_spam.htm 2.87% 645

Jan 2003

home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20020923_net_send_yet_another_type_of_spam.htm 4.90% 1294

home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20021107_stop_net_send_spam.htm 4.84% 1279

www.wangjianshuo.com/personal/places/pudongairport/ 4.11% 1086

Feb 2003

home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20021107_stop_net_send_spam.htm 7.86% 2144

home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20020923_net_send_yet_another_type_of_spam.htm 3.92% 1068

home.wangjianshuo.com/ 3.73% 1017

Nov 2003

home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20030812_msn_messenger_emotion_pictures.htm 7.59% 5569

home.wangjianshuo.com/ 6.06% 4446

home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20031112_muzimeis_sex_blog_brought_trouble.htm 4.51% 3309

December 2003

home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20030812_msn_messenger_emotion_pictures.htm 6.91% 5411

home.wangjianshuo.com/ 6.61% 5179

www.wangjianshuo.com/ 2.99% 2340

Top referring domain

Oct 2002

www.google.com 33.66% 413

search.yahoo.com 16.14% 198

cnblog.blogspot.com 7.17% 88

Nov 2002

www.google.com 41.11% 2134

search.yahoo.com 15.43% 801

search.msn.com 5.18% 269

Dec 2002:

www.google.com 40.04% 1985

search.yahoo.com 17.27% 856

search.msn.com 9.24% 458

Jan 2003

www.google.com 43.41% 3702

search.yahoo.com 14.18% 1209

search.msn.com 5.12% 437

Feb 2003

www.google.com 43.86% 4305

search.yahoo.com 14.72% 1445

search.msn.com 4.48% 440

Page hits

Hits in Oct, Nov, Dec in 2002 and Jan, Feb in 2003 are actual number while the others are forecasted

===== 2002 =====

Oct 4K

Nov 17K

Dec 23K

===== 2003 =====

Jan 27K

Feb 28K

Mar 40K ~~31K~~

Apr 85K (85301) ~~35k~~

May ~~50K~~

June ~~80K~~

July ~~100K~~

Aug ~~120K~~

Sep ~~150K~~

Oct 78K (77,888)

Nov 78K (78,341)

Dec 84K (83,847)

===== 2004 =====

Jan 88K (88,030)

The website in one hits year (Oct 1 to Sept 30): 665K

Brett stated in his Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone

I guarantee you that in ones years time you will call your site a success. It will be drawing between 500 and 2000 referrals a day from search engines. If you build a good site with an average of 4 to 5 pages per user, you should be in the 10-15k page views per day range in one years time.

He called 10K hits per day a “successful website”. I hope I can get half success at the end of hit year 2003 (HY2003) with 5K page view per day.

Updated: April 22, 2003

Page hits of March 2003 turned out to be 40K, 29% more than forecasted.

Updated: May 3, 2003

Page hits of April 2003 is 85K (85301), 114% more than forecast.

Update: January 1, 2004

November 2003: 78341

December 2003: 83847


== October 2003 ==

October 1, 2003	2607

October 2, 2003	3096

October 3, 2003	2248

October 4, 2003	2289

October 5, 2003	1894

October 6, 2003	2811

October 7, 2003	2553

October 8, 2003	2569

October 9, 2003	2996

October 10, 2003	3013

October 11, 2003	2301

October 12, 2003	1856

October 13, 2003	2578

October 14, 2003	3316

October 15, 2003	2986

October 16, 2003	3362

October 17, 2003	2843

October 18, 2003	2424

October 19, 2003	2287

October 20, 2003	2606

October 21, 2003	3091

October 22, 2003	2984

October 23, 2003	2653

October 24, 2003	2656

October 25, 2003	2021

October 26, 2003	1844

October 27, 2003	1513

October 28, 2003	2567

October 29, 2003	2033

October 30, 2003	1958

October 31, 2003	1933

== November 2003 ==

November 1, 2003	1942

November 2, 2003	2795

November 3, 2003	2472

November 4, 2003	2410

November 5, 2003	2845

November 6, 2003	2389

November 7, 2003	1922

November 8, 2003	1705

November 9, 2003	2104

November 10, 2003	3245

November 11, 2003	2660

November 12, 2003	2680

November 13, 2003	2671

November 14, 2003	2480

November 15, 2003	2401

November 16, 2003	3057

November 17, 2003	3036

November 18, 2003	3171

November 19, 2003	3310

November 20, 2003	3142

November 21, 2003	1960

November 22, 2003	1912

November 23, 2003	2764

November 24, 2003	3468

November 25, 2003	3129

November 26, 2003	3418

November 27, 2003	2306

November 28, 2003	2166

November 29, 2003	2782

November 30, 2003	3286

=== December 2003 ===

December 1, 2003	3209

December 2, 2003	3313

December 3, 2003	3306

December 4, 2003	2971

December 5, 2003	2150

December 6, 2003	2200

December 7, 2003	3002

December 8, 2003	3499

December 9, 2003	3310

December 10, 2003	3210

December 11, 2003	3205

December 12, 2003	2559

December 13, 2003	2144

December 14, 2003	2277

December 15, 2003	3386

December 16, 2003	3075

December 17, 2003	3152

December 18, 2003	2872

December 19, 2003	2067

December 20, 2003	1883

December 21, 2003	2440

December 22, 2003	2784

December 23, 2003	2825

December 24, 2003	2301

December 25, 2003	2032

December 26, 2003	2108

December 27, 2003	2248

December 28, 2003	2324

December 29, 2003	2431

December 30, 2003	2278

=== January 2004 ===

January 1    1.62% 1709

January 2    1.89% 1988

January 3    2.07% 2176

January 4    2.19% 2307

January 5    2.61% 2747

January 6    2.90% 3048

January 7    2.43% 2554

January 8    3.54% 3731

January 9    4.12% 4337

January 10   2.73% 2873

January 11   2.03% 2138

January 12   2.87% 3022

January 13   2.80% 2942

January 14   2.71% 2849

January 15   3.06% 3219

January 16   3.10% 3261

January 17   2.00% 2109

January 18   2.71% 2856

January 19   4.05% 4265

January 20   3.25% 3417

January 21   2.66% 2802

January 22   2.46% 2586

January 23   2.59% 2721

January 24   2.68% 2824

January 25   2.14% 2254

January 26   2.41% 2533

January 27   2.79% 2936

January 28   2.76% 2909

January 29   2.74% 2883

January 30   2.85% 3002

January 31   2.88% 3032

Fixing and Changing on Wangjianshuo.com

Posted on March 12, 2003 by Jian Shuo Wang

Fixing

The PVGBBS has been out of order for about one month. Whenever I click on any of the post, it always report:

Untrapped Error:

./sources/display.pl does not return a value from E:\Customer\Wangjianshuo\…

This is an annoying error and I looked it up on Internet and didn’t find any suggestions. Actually, the error message is too broad and does not help.

Finally, after I backup all the files into my local disk, I suddenly noticed that display.pl has the size of 0 byte. How can it happen? I downloaded another copy of YABB Gold 1 SP 1.0 and replaced the problematic display.pl – everything works like a charm.

It turned out that during the change of web server, the staff from my ISP didn’t migrate my site completely. There are some posts and files lost during the migration, but the affect is minor.

Changing

The homepage of wangjianshuo.com is changed to the new style:

News from Wangjianshuo.com’s blog (this web site) appears on that static web site using VBScript.

If you are also using MovableType, just create a new index template named “News Feeding VBScript” and let it create page named news.vbs. Use the code below as the content of the template, save it and rebuild, your blog newsfeed is ready.

Here is the source code of the VBScript generating the headlines:

<script language=vbscript src="http://home.wangjianshuo.com/news.vbs"></script><

On Error Resume Next

Sub PrintNews()

strNewsHTML = ""

<MTEntries lastn="7">

strNewsHTML= strNewsHTML + "<a href=<$MTEntryLink$>#<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>><$MTEntryTitle$></a>

<span class=posted><$MTEntryDate format="%B %d"$></span><br />"

</MTEntries>

Document.Write strNewsHTML

End Sub

Call PrintNews

Adding the following line to the webpage (http://www.wangjianshuo.com/index.htm) and the headline is displayed automatically.

<script language=vbscript src="http://home.wangjianshuo.com/news.vbs"></script>

This is the redesigned homepage.

You can provide me some feedbacks regarding the redesign using the comment function with this blog.