Server Specifications
This site can be considered running on a dedicated server as it only host 30 other domains which belongs to friends and families of both Michael and I. This server is housed at M1 Connect (previously known as Qala). It has 1mbps guaranteed and 10mbps burstable bandwidth.

• Dell PowerEdge 860
• Single Dual-Core Intel Xeon 3050, 2.13GHz, 1066MHz front side bus, 2MB cache
• 2x 1GB ECC DDR2 667 SDRAM
• 1x 250GB & 1x 500GB 7.2K RPM SATA II Hard Drive
• CentOS Release 5

I also have a backup server provided by Vodien Internet Solutions which I will rysnc to manually every week.

• Dell PowerEdge 2950
• 2x Intel Quad Core Xeon E5420
• 16GB Ram
• 4x 300GB SAS RAID 10
• CentOS Release 5

If you are looking for web hosting, do check them out, their support response time is fantastic!

WordPress Theme
This theme is developed by me and hence it is not available to the public as I want to keep it unique. I am using Facybox to display single images in a modal window. Yes, I am using jQuery as well. For some of my feeds like my Twitter feed and WordPress Plugins feed are retrieved and parsed using SimplePie which is included in WordPress.

There is also a iPhone version which is optimized for iPhone viewing, just visit this site in iPhone and it will redirect you to the iPhone version.

Most if not all of the pages in this website is validated as XHTML 1.0 Strict.

WordPress Plugins
I am a WordPress plugins developer however not all the plugins I developed are used on this website as I think plugins like WP-Ban and WP-PostRatings are not necessary as I don’t wish to ban any people from my site or getting my post rated.

I modified only one plugin which is the Breadcrumb plugin by Dan Peverill to have my plugins’ breadcrumbs such as WP-Email and WP-UserOnline displayed using it.

There are also two plugins which I created personally for this website, lesterchan.net Plugin houses several of the functions used in this website and WP-GalleryViewer powers my Gallery. Both of them are not available to the public as it is highly customized to this website.

• Akismet
• Breadcrumb – Modified
• Digg Button
• Google XML Sitemaps
• lesterchan.net Plugin – Not Available
• WordPress.com Stats
• WP-CommentNavi
• WP-DBManager
• WP-DownloadManager
• WP-EMail
• WP-GalleryViewer 1.00 – Not Available
• WP-PageNavi
• WP-PluginsUsed
• WP-Polls
• WP-PostViews
• WP-Print
• WP-RelativeDate
• WP-ServerInfo
• WP-Stats
• WP-UserOnline

Full Details on my Plugins Used Page.

Tracking
I am using the following statistical tools to track and analyze my site traffic.

• Webalizer
• Google Analytics
• WordPress.com Stats
• Extreme Tracking (Depreciated)

URL Shortener
I am using lc.sg as my personal URL shortener and it is powered by YOURLS which is initially developed by me but now, it is developed mainly by Ozh himself. Ozh if you see this, thank you!

Others?
If I missed out anything and you wish to know more about it, do leave it in the comments and I will try my best to add it in.

I am not a guru when it comes to SEO, what I know about SEO is from what I heard from my friends and forums. I also do not believe in paying thousand over dollars just to get a good SEO because most of the tools are free!

Just would like to share the stuff I did on this website to improve it’s SEO:

• Age of domain does matter, I bought lesterchan.net way back in 24th January 2004 which makes this domain close to 6 years old.
• I am using Google XML Sitemaps to send sitemaps to various search engine.
• Post title always appear first in the browser title bar before the domain name or website name, eg “Site Traffic October 2009 « Blog | lesterchan.net”.
• I allow bots to crawl my whole website using <meta name=”robots” content=”all” />
• From a user perspective, I always think what search term might the user Google for and I use that as the post title. eg “Windows 7 Pricing in Singapore” or “SingTel iPhone 3GS Price Plans”. All these post has become my most viewed posts.
• Produce content that users really want in order to get them to link back to you. Example, my highest viewed page is my WordPress Plugins Page.
• Register your website with Google Webmasters Tools.

Tools used to track my website:

• Webalizer
• Google Analytics
• WordPress.com Stats
• Extreme Tracking (Depreciated)

Feel free to add in more SEO tips in the comments.

Li Xiang has a surprise for us (my brother and I) for our birthday! She designed a plastic acrylic sheet for both of us. Mine is lesterchan.net whereas my brother is xeroy with a star. Thank you so much Penguin! Get well soon and drink lots of water!

lesterchan.net – View 1

lesterchan.net – View 2

xeroy

After almost 24 hours of downtime, finally the site is back online. We are there at REACH Datacenter to remove the server at 10pm and after that we reached Qala Datacenter about 11pm. 2 mistakes on our part, firstly we did not bring any CentOS installation DVD to install on Derrick Server and hence we wasted about 2 hours to download the file via torrent at 500KB/s. Since all of us are using old laptops, it took us about 45 minutes just to burn and verify the DVD. The first DVD that we burnt using Michael laptop, the server has problem reading it. Only at the second attempt using my laptop, it works. Hence we wasted another 1 hour and 30 minutes.

The second and biggest mistake of all is we (Derrick and I) forgot to change our Direct Admin license registered IP, the license is still being tag to our old server and hence DirectAdmin cannot start. By this time it is about 4am and everybody is tired, decided to pack up at 5am and went home, after dropping Derrick at Jurong East interchange Michael and I went to my mom office to collect his monitor that he has left it there. Derrick called me and say that his Direct Admin license IP has been updated and asked me to check mine, and yeap, mine is updated as well. Michael updated the license on our server and it just took 5 minutes. Went for breakfast after that at the canteen below my mom office as it operates 24 hours. After everything was done, it was about 6am. Sent Michael home and reached home about 7am.

The waiting game is for our local shitty and slow ISP to refresh its DNS records to reflect our new server IP. Apparently, Michael told me that Starhub do that every 15 hours while Singtel do that every 30 hours. It is because of the DNS propagation that makes this site goes down for about 24 hours.

But anyway, the site can now be considered running on a “dedicated” server with a guaranteed 1Mbps line with a shared 10Mbps burstable line and the server is hosting about 10 domains only.

Anyway, if you all need hosting, check out sgWebster Solutions

Some minor updates to lesterchan.net and hence I bump the site version to 3.30:

• Combined these 5 JavaScript files together:
  • Simple AJAX Code-Kit (TW-Sack)
  • ThickBox
  • Docking Boxes (DBX)
  • Docking Boxes Key File
  • lesterchan.net’s JavaScript File
• Minified CSS and JavaScript files using YUI Compressor
• Moved Google Analytics JavaScript code to the footer
• Added “My Wish List” (shopping cart icon) to the Welcome Area
• Changed “Posted By” to “Posted by”
• Added a new poll entitled “How Often You Visit lesterchan.net?”

The remaining optimization involved upgrading my plugins used on this site as well to WordPress 2.8 nightly which is not recommended for a production site and hence I will only further optimize this site’s JavaScript when WordPress 2.8 comes out in March/April.

I have upgraded lesterchan.net to WordPress 2.7 alongside with all my updated plugins. Please let me know if you find any bugs on this site by dropping me an email or posting it in the comments. Thanks a lot =)

The update is smooth and it only takes about 30 minutes. Not much compatibility issue here except I have to uninstall my WP-Sticky as WordPress 2.7 has already a sticky post feature built in.

I will create another separate post to highlight the updates to my plugins.

Spend more than 10 hours to modify lesterchan.net layout to make it iPhone/iPod Touch viewable. At the moment, you can only view blog post and not pages. I have no plans to make the pages iPhone/iPod Touch viewable yet as it is a lot of work and I don’t find it necessary.

Just point your iPhone or iPod Touch to lesterchan.net and it will detect your user agent and serve you the iPhone/iPod Touch layout if you are using either of the devices.

Here are 2 essential resources to get you stared, Apple: Safari Web Content Guide for iPhone and Ajaxian: iPhone Web Development Tips and Official Documentation Released.

lesterchan.net on iPhone (Portrait – Width: 320px)

lesterchan.net on iPhone (Landscape – Width: 480px)

While on the topic of site updates, here is the changelog since 4th July 2008:

• NEW: Close comments after 30 days instead of 14 days
• NEW: Highlight search words when viewing post
• NEW: Add hosted by Frro
• NEW: Add scroll bar To Recent Comments in Welcome Box if content too long
• NEW: Upgraded To WordPress 2.6
• NEW: Upgraded My Plugins
• FIXED: Removed all broken links using Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin
• FIXED: “No Comments” text not displayed if there is at least 1 trackback/pingback with no comments posted
• FIXED: Comment numbering is wrong after doing AJAX comment posting if there is at least 1 trackback/pingback
• FIXED: Search two or more words
• FIXED: Gallery hits increased by 1 on every photo viewed
• FIXED: Added urldecode() for $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] in 404 page
• FIXED: 10 Latest Comments in Welcome Box showing Pingback/Trackback

I am a sucker when it comes to changelog. I document almost every changes I made to my WordPress plugins’ under their respective changelog and I am hopping to bring that good habbit to this site as well.

It has been 1 month since the launch of lesterchan.net Version 3.0. Along the way I fixed many bugs and added a few new features to the site.

1 month later, I present to you lesterchan.net Version 3.10.

Version 3.10 (4th July 2008)
Index

• NEW: Reorganised “Welcome to lesterchan.net” box
• NEW: Seperated My Computer and My Desktop in “Welcome” box
• NEW: Added 10 Recent Posts from My WordPress Plugins Blog to “Welcome” box
• NEW: Added 10 Recent Posts to “Welcome” box
• NEW: Added 10 Recent Comments to “Welcome” box
• NEW: Added user IP below Last Visited date
• NEW: Added a link to my Twitter profile
• NEW: Renamed “Lester …” to “Lester Chan on Twitter” and moved it to “Welcome” box

Blog

• NEW: Renamed “x Comments” to “x Responses”, “1 Comment” to “1 Response” and “No Comments” to “No Response” as reponses are made up of comments, trackbacks and pingbacks
• NEW: Trackbacks and Pingbacks are displayed separately from the comments and they are counted seperately as well
• NEW: Prefixed a “arrow point right” icon to the “Read More” link
• NEW: Suffixed Word, Image and Video count to “Read More” link
• NEW: Added “By Author” in Blog Archive page
• NEW: Added a Star icon beside my name when commenting
• NEW: Added Gravatar to comments
• NEW: Added Tag support for breadcrumb navigation
• FIXED: Duplicate crumbs when doing paginating Category/Date/Author
• FIXED: RSS feed URL now points to Feedburner
• FIXED: Spread the listing of categories and tags into 3 columns instead of a single column

Menu

• NEW: Menu items (not boxes) slides up and down when toggled
• NEW: Menu fading in and out when changing from left to right
• NEW: Paypal donation image now shown by default
• NEW: Added “Quick Links” menu box in order to access my plugin page within 1 click
• NEW: Renamed “Others” to “Network” and moved it from “Navigation” to “Quick Links” menu box
• FIXED: “Menu Settings” menu box icon now reflect the position of the menu sidebar
• FIXED: Menu is now able to move to the left and back to the right in IE7

General

• NEW: Added Google Analytics tracking code
• NEW: Combined portfolio.css and gallery.css with style.css
• NEW: Optimized style.css

Site

• FIXED: Associate links within “lesterchan.net Network” with Lester Chan instead of GaMerZ
• FIXED: “lesterchan.net Network” Link Category named wrongly

Portfolio

• NEW: Added “Lester Chan’s Webpage”, “AllEventsGroup.com”, “FirstFood.com.sg” and “Raffles Airline HR Management System” to websites
• FIXED: Removed Demo link for WP-Wap as it is no longer in development

Gallery

• FIXED: Gallery image description is now centerized

I have brought forward the launch of lesterchan.net a few days in advanced as I may not be free on the 9th June 2008 which is the original intended date of launch.

After more than 4 years of using the same layout, the old layout (version 2.0) has been finally replaced with this newer (version 3.0) layout. I think some of you may find this layout a little dull as compared to the previous layout because of the colors used. I am trying to come out with a variety of color schemes if possible because of the colors are controlled by CSS, the only limitation is choose the color. Do note that I am not a designer but a programmer. Most programmers are poor designers and most designers are poor programmers.

Changelog

• Upgraded site from WordPress 1.5.1 to WordPress 2.5.1
• Upgraded plugins from WordPress 1.5.1 to WordPress 2.5.1 compatibility
• Renamed /blogs/ to /blog/
• Merge Calendar and Archive Page
• Brand new AJAX driven Archive Page
• Brand new Donation Page
• Brand new AJAX driven Contact Me Page
• Re-coded Search engine
• Re-coded Gallery feature
• Re-coded Alex King’s Since Last Visit plugin
• Added Plugins Used Page
• Split Programming Page into 3 sub-pages, PHP, Java and Visual Basic
• Posting Comments is now in AJAX
• Movable menu boxes by brother cake’s Docking Boxes
• Menu is able to switch from left to right and vice versa and your preference will be remembered
• Javascript are all compressed/packed by Dean Edward’s Packer
• jQuery used extensively
• ThickBox used for Portfolio Images
• Using FamFamFam icons

Todo

• Add Playlist Page
• Add sitemap.xml
• Update favico.ico

Feel free to browse through the whole site if you have not been doing so for a very long time as most of the pages has been updated.

All the old URLs should be redirected properly to the new URLs, I have spent quite a lot of effort to ensure that.

You can report bugs in the comments =)