Updates

Along with the domain change, the blog has a new name. Changing the domain directly in Typecho previously left the site displaying garbled text. I therefore backed up all of the website files and the database and rebuilt the site. All data was migrated successfully without loss. The main reason for the new name is to give the blog a more distinctive identity. There do not seem to be many sites quite like this, and I hope we can learn to code and share what we discover together. There were no major problems during the migration, and most of the smaller issues have been resolved. ...

Updated the playback controls and added a seek bar. Changed the background color of syntax-highlighted code to improve readability. Added article word counts so readers can estimate how long a post will take to read. On mobile, tapping the avatar now collapses the sidebar automatically. Fixed a minor styling issue with the left sidebar in Safari. Added a gallery.

Why I moved The blog was previously hosted with CoffeeHost. Quite a few friends reported that it was inaccessible or extremely slow, so I decided to move it. After a difficult choice, I settled on HostShare’s Hong Kong 103 SSD VPS. I had spent more than twenty days on CoffeeHost’s Hong Kong CN2 VPS, and the experience was disappointing. Apart from support tickets, I found the owner’s attitude unfriendly. I requested TUN/TAP access so I could configure BBR; the purchase page explicitly said it could be enabled. In the end, the response was along the lines of: “What do you need that for? Getting around restrictions? BBR? CN2 is fast enough. Don’t enable it…” ...

Whenever I make a substantial change to the blog, I tend to rebuild it from scratch. What you are looking at now is its ninth rebuild. I first got into this two years ago. After seeing plenty of recommendations for GoDaddy hosting, I bought a year and followed a tutorial to set up WordPress. That became my first website. Building a site seemed straightforward, but GoDaddy’s Singapore server routed traffic through the United States and was painfully slow. The routing has since become direct. SMTP mail also had problems, so I stopped working on it. In the second year, I bought a BandwagonHost VPS. I learned to install a control panel and gained more control over my site. Overall, BWH was damn good: despite heavy overselling, it remained very responsive. I mainly bought it for getting around internet restrictions, though, and stopped using it after the IP address was blocked. ...