Category: Site

lesterchan.net 4.0 was launched more than 7 years ago.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started, I have been staying at home most of the time, and it began to get boring. Work, watch television, play computer games, play console games, and the cycle repeats.

I have submmited a request for this site to publish Facebook Instant Articles since last Thursday and it finally got approved today (despite it says 24-48 hours review process)

I am using the official plugin called Instant Articles for WP by Automattic to generate an Instant Article RSS feed.

Just a recap of the major changes of lesterchan.net after v4.3:

Now for the changes in v4.4.

Algolia is a French startup that provides hosted cloud search as a service with lots of developer-friendly API.

Integration is really easy regardless of what language you are using. They have 11 API clients and 4 mobile SDKs, including a WordPress plugin if you are using WordPress.

After the move to nginx/php-fpm, the next natural course of action is to move to HHVM and php-fpm as a fallback.

What is HHVM?

Previously, lesterchan.net averages about 1,900ms in response time according to Pingdom Public Status Page. When I switched over to HTTPS, the response time increased to 2,600ms. I was still on Apache 2.4.7 running PHP 5.5.9 via mod_php.

When I made the switch to nginx 1.6.2 running PHP 5.5.22 via php-fpm, the response time decreases back to 1,900ms.

HTTPS
In case you haven’t notice, lesterchan.net is now on HTTPS.

Back in August 2014, Google announced that they will use HTTPS as a ranking signal for searches:

Been about 10 months since lesterchan.net v4.2. For v4.3, the changes are mostly cosmetic and backend.

Web Push Notifications by Roost
I have added Roost‘s push notification service. If you visit this site more than two times using Safari (Chrome and Firefox is coming soon), you will get a push notification opt-in prompt. If you opt-in, every time there is a new post on this site, you will get a push notification as shown in the image below.

lesterchan.net is now on NewsLoop under the category Tech & Gadgets, joining in 600 other publishers on the platform.

What is Newsloop?
NewsLoop which is an app by SingTel, puts together the best news and lifestyle content from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, Philippines and Thailand, all into a single elegant app. With over 600 publishers and 30 categories of stories to choose from, NewsLoop lets you discover news that matters to you.