Category Archives: Site

Site related posts. When I change something or add something into this site.

Something very boring, site moved

Posted on by

This time something very boring, post about technical stuff. :D

Guess Who Am I and Fangcaoxin have moved, they have stayed the whole existence with DreamHost but it was time to get them renewed completely. First they got a new look (new Twenty Ten from WordPress 3.0) and then new home. The new home was found from VPS.NET and at the same time we moved our CDN from Amazon to Akamai. Hopefully, after all of these changes, the websites will be also quite much faster for our visitors from Asia (mainly China and South Korea).

Guesswhoami.com was originally registered on November 2005 and fangcaoxin.com was registered on August 2008. Both started their lives on DreamHost, moved from shared hosting to the Private Server, got upgraded many times and also took some of the optimizations into use (W3 Total Cache and XCache for example). In the end they were also running Amazon CloudFront as their CDN.

Well, we have relatives in China who enjoy our blogs (mainly they enjoy Fangfang’s blog as I am rather boring and do not post as often as my wife) and also photos about our life in Finland. Lost of photos online will usually result some kind of performance problem and eventually you end up looking for a CDN.

I was looking for faster CDN, which would have better presence (especially in Asia) as well. We had started from CacheFly, switched to Amazon CloudFront and I had tested also CloudFiles but nothing looked exactly like I wanted. But then I came across with quite interesting option, there would be possibility to purchase Akamai through VPS.NET and as everyone know, Akamai is the king of the CDNs. I signed up and noticed how much better Akamai is but what I noticed at the same time was how good was VPS.NET experience. Quite refreshing in today’s Internet so I tested a little bit to see how good they would be as a VPS.

And results was that I moved our blogs to VPS.NET. Now we are happily running one VPS hosting our blogs and another running our databases (powered with Fusion-io power). And our blogs really fly nowadays, we basically cut our load times to half.

And I have been testing with all the possible testing sites also the speeds from mainland China and it looks very good. Some might argue that our load times are better because the blogs are now located in Europe, which is partly true as it will give us benefit when we are writing new posts but main difference is also coming from the fact that VPS.NET is very well connected to Internet.

Why work so much just for two personal blogs? One reason is to make everyone happy, Fangfang can update her blog more often and more easily when it is fast and responsive. We will also get (hopefully) more visitors because our blogs are faster. And everyone in the family are able to see what we are doing and they do not have to wait until they get bored to see our newest photos.

And this is an interesting hobby …

I told you, this is boring post. Technical stuff. :D

New look for the website

Posted on by

It was time to renew the look and how this website works. I tried to make it also faster and hopefully it will be fast also from China.

Now I just should write more often here. :-)

New design for Guess Who Am I blog

Posted on by

Today I enabled the new design for my blog; this design is especially designed only for this blog and is excellent work from yichi. Many plugins have been also updated along the process and some have been changed to completely new. New year is almost ready to begin and my blog is ready to start it too.

Site outage

Posted on by

I don’t know if you have noticed but there has been an outage on my web site for the past three days. It is because the hosting provide I use, DreamHost, is having a great problems with one of the filers. And of course that filer is the one, which holds all my web site files.

At the moment it seems that it doesn’t get fixed very soon and things are really badly broken; I have decided to go around this problem by building my web site from the beginning into the new filer. So please be patient, many things will be very broken during the next days as it is also very slow process to transfer any files from the old filer to the new one. One feature, which will take a longer time will be the photo gallery. Blog is now up and running as it was before.

First post for the new domain

Posted on by

This is my new domain and new web site. It was rather difficult process to find a good unregistered domain but finally I found it.

New beginning in my private life and also new domain – logical isn’t it? Private life got the new direction quite much earlier and now it was time to change online direction.

Moblogging

Posted on by

Started to use my newest mobile phone for blogging … after a little bit work I managed to tweak WordPress to allow photos to be submitted via mobile phone. The previous post with a photo was submitted as a MMS from my mobile phone.