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 sight, [...]

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 plumbs all [...]

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 as [...]

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 [...]

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 did [...]

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 [...]