Revamping joetsang.net

I must have spent over 100 hours over the past two weeks revamping my humble web site, which will have its 10th birthday celebration next year. Some of the changes are visible. Some are not. [Note: My web site started off almost 10 years ago with a single page: News on China, Hong Kong and Taiwan]

For example, I have been thinking about changing the look of the text-based entry page for some time now. But given my limited skills in web writing and just plain laziness, I haven't been doing anything until recently. Now joetsang.net has a new entry page, and it is a graphics-based one.

I have also created banners for many pages, particularly the travel photos pages.

A new page called Good Food 街 has just been released. It puts together some of the good food Cindy experimented with since we moved to Brisbane.

I have updated a lot of the pages, for example, those related to Kieslowski, and that on News on China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Websites came and went at an alarming speed and it is very time consuming to keep links up-to-dated. Also, some of the sites which were excellent a few years ago are no longer so now. In the case of Kieslowski, while a lot of the sites in English have gone dead, the number of those in Chinese have risen at an exponential rate.

I am also in the process of writing a new page which is not yet ready to be unveiled.

Regarding my two blogs, I have also been trying to keeping posting entries as frequently as possible. As I said to a fellow web enthusiast - who introduced me to Blogger.com - some time ago, creating a blog is easy, but maintaining it is difficult. After the initial excitement, bloggers usually find it difficult to find things meaningful to write about. For the readers, it just doesn't look good if no entries are posted for a prologed period of time. Also, I jokingly wrote in a recent blog entry that visitor should stay just a little bit longer, since statistics showed that over 80% of visitors to joetsang.net spent less than 30 seconds there. A friend commented that, to achieve this, I should write longer pieces. And I can say I have been trying, hard.

So much for the visible changes.

For the invisible changes, I have cleaned up some of the underlying html codes, although they are still largely standard non-compliant.

Since moving back to the stone age of Internet access (now using dial-up), I have come to the realisation that some of my pages are too long and too graphics oriented and therefore take a long time to load. I had been warned of that before, but since I was then using super-fast broadband, and that most of the graphics in the site were cached anyway, I felt no need to do anything about it. It was only when circumstances changed (to the worse) that I understood how fructrating it was to wait for a web page to load.

I have therefore splitted some of the long graphics-heavy pages into several parts. But more importantly, I have resized almost all graphics files on my site. They now have a small file size but no sacrifice in graphics quality (I hope). This task, involving over 1,000 files, took hours of manual labour.

I can proudly say that I have done something worthy in my 10th year as a web addict. And I am as addicted as ever!