Been almost 9 months since I did an upgrade to this site, so I guess it is time for me to post a site update. Most of it is about optimising the site so that it performs faster and better.
This site now has a performance score of 90 out of 100 for Pingdom’s Website Speed Test!
I launched lesterchan.net v3.0 on the 5th June 2008. More than 4 years later, it is time for a change in design/layout. I decided to go back to the light color theme because it is easier to match colors and icons.
Welcome to lesterchan.net v4.0. It is built using Boostrap with icons from Fatcow and the new logo is done by Li Xiang. Because it is built using Bootstrap, lesterchan.net now incorporates responsive design.
Just in case you haven’t notice, I have added in a Featured Section under Blog on the sidebar located on the right.
This featured section will contain blog posts with original content categorized by their respective companies. Original content in the sense that they are not from press releases or copied and pasted from somewhere else. These original content are either compiled by me (example: SingTel) or they can be items bought by me (example: Bluelounge).
I have joined the Microblogging bandwagon and Posterous is my weapon of choice. I chose Posterous over Tumblr because the UI of Posterous is clean and intuitive and even the Posterous’s iOS App is pretty well done.
Personally, I think Tumblr has too much features for me such as the sharing of Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio and Video. I personally going to use a microblogging service to share photos with some text only and hence Posterous fits my needs.
Spend the weekends trying to get Cacti up and running on this VPS. Apparently since this VPS is using WHM on CentOS, there are some packages like Apache, PHP, MYSQL, Perl, Ruby installed directly but not indicated as installed via Yum and hence it is failing dependency check when trying to install rrdtool.
What is Cacti
Every since my WatchMouse Public Website Health Status was setup for this site on 17th March 2011, I have been getting “Performance issues” with a yellow icon besides it everyday.
That kinda irritated me. So on Saturday, 26th March 2011, I decided to optimize the site. I switched the home page to display 5 posts instead of the previous 10 posts so that it loads lesser stuff, but apparently it does not make a significant difference.
Sometimes when you visit the site, it will return you a blank page or give you a null response back, for example:
$ curl –head lesterchan.net
curl: (52) Empty reply from server
If you are seeing this blog post, it means the DNS has resolved correctly for you. I have moved the site from my dedicated server in Frro to a VPS in Vodien. I did it because I wanted to play with more Linux stuff. And if I did it on the dedicated server at Frro, it may screw some of the sites hosted there and may cause downtime for them which is a absolutely no-no.
In terms of control panel, previously I am using DirectAdmin and now on the VPS, I am using CPanel. As CPanel is much more popular than DirectAdmin, there are tons of resources and tutorials available out there. I followed this tutorial, Memcached and PHP with cPanel, and got memcached up and running within 15 minutes on the VPS!
*UPDATE* And we are now back up after about 3 hours of downtime!
This site will be offline for a few hours between 10pm 18th December 2010 (GMT +8) to 6am 19th December 2010 (GMT +8) for migration of server rack.
NetDNA, a Content Distribution Network (CDN) company, is now sponsoring lesterchan.net! So now I am offloading all my static files (Images, CSS & JavaScript) to NetDNA’s CDN services.
They have 10 data centers around the world and provide CDN services for more than 200 large websites such as:
