Scott Yang's Playground

I have updated Playground to a new WordPress theme. It’s pretty much derived from the old theme, 100% hand coded. These are the things I want from a new theme. Simple one column layout. White background, dark gray fonts, and nothing fancy. Bigger text font. Probably better for those who do not have 20-20 eye [...]

AdSense Preview Tool for Firefox. It basically just creates a pop up window showing what ads would appear on the web page you are looking at, if Google AdSense is used. Very useful for deciding whether you should put AdSense on your website. However it does not have localisation preview like the “official” preview tool, [...]

After my article on Bargain Blog about the cheapest .au registrar, I decided to transfer my yang.id.au domain from NameScout, whom I registered with since July 2002, to IntaServe, because it is (a) $2/year cheaper (b) having an Australian contact number. However, the transfer didn’t proceed that smoothly.

Stupid thing I did this week: In the process of moving Bargain Blog back to my own home server, I somehow rsync’ed my entire design/test site, including the robots.txt, which contains deadly commands to forbid all bots/spiders! No wonder for the last few days my AdSense ads on that site are totally irrelevant, and CTR [...]

Almost two weeks ago I launched my new programming/Internet blogsite. It does not make me write more — actually due to my current schedules I actually wrote less. All it did was splitting up the content, so that my programming and Internet related posts get filed elsewhere. Good idea, as I have originally thought, and [...]

There have been basically two types of “readers” on this blog. One is either my family, friends, church friends or other strangers who are interested in part of my daily life, my Christian opinions, and my occasional rant over things that do not really matter. They got bored reading posts with too many tech jargons, [...]

I have been thinking about doing it for a while – a blog that lists all the cheap deals that we have discovered during the week, a blog that might save us a few pennies – a bargain blog. There are actually quite a few bargain blogs or hot deal listings out there on the [...]

Last week I looked at the option of adding sponsored links via AdSense to this site. So far I am getting around 5 bucks from the clicks. Not too bad I guess, but at the same time it is far from covering my Internet bandwidth. An interesting exercise nevertheless, as it was my very first [...]

Donncha shared his simple MySQL backup script that backs up individual WordPress tables into separate .sql.gz files, and keeps a week worth of them just in case something horrible happens. This is exactly what I did this morning! Write a simple Bash script that loops through 20+ databases, and create .sql.gz files per database. I [...]

You know. Managing and providing hosting to two to three dozen websites out of your own pocket can be a costly exercise. I have been quite reluctant to do so for a while, for the fear of ‘tainting’ this blog. But I see that the dark side is greater, more powerful and more seductive, and [...]

As Bruce Schneier has suggested, I have also added a latest comments section on Scott Yang’s Playground, so I can keep track the most recent contributors to this blogsite, and remember which ones I need to reply. I don’t get as many visitors as Mr. Schneier’s security news site, so I will not embarrass myself [...]

Just updates on some of my current “projects” that have kept me very much occupied.

I have recently installed two WordPress plugins to slightly enhance the visual of comments. Gravatars – uses the globally recognised avatar to display a 48×48 image next to each comment to identify its poster. IP to Nation – displays a little country flag next to the comment poster’s name, guessed from its incoming IP address. [...]

Finally, I’ve upgraded this site to WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn”. Not as straightforward as I initially thought, as there were too many custom hacks from my previous install. I’ve also changed the theme slightly to get rid of the sidebar completely, replacing with a navigation bar at the top. None of my plugins is working yet, [...]

Looks like I’ve done it again – Playground has been re-styled. Instead of making it a real eye pleaser, I’ve decided to make it simpler. White background everywhere. Minimal borders around the canvases. No decorating pictures. Bland. Maybe I’ll do away with this whole CSS thingy in the next iteration of Playground redesign.