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	<title>RohJuh.com &#187; Site</title>
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	<link>http://rohjuh.com</link>
	<description>The Personal Site of Roger Hsu and Judy Ho.</description>
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		<title>V5</title>
		<link>http://rohjuh.com/2008/03/14/v5/</link>
		<comments>http://rohjuh.com/2008/03/14/v5/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 15 Mar 2008 05:28:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Roger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Site]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://rohjuh.com/2008/03/14/v5/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Stating the obvious, Version 5 of RohJuh.com&#8217;s got a fresh, new look. If you&#8217;re scratching your head, then you&#8217;re either new to the site, have a bad memory, or need to hit &#8220;Reload&#8221; on your browser. Here are some key highlights of RohJuh V5: W I D E S C R E E N! I [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="centerednoborder" width="300" height="196" src="http://rohjuh.com/av/2008/v5.png" alt="V5 graphic" /></p>
<p>Stating the obvious, Version 5 of RohJuh.com&#8217;s got a fresh, new look. If you&#8217;re scratching your head, then you&#8217;re either new to the site, have a bad memory, or need to hit &#8220;Reload&#8221; on your browser. Here are some key highlights of RohJuh V5:</p>
<ul>
<li>W I D E S C R E E N! I kind of went against convention and made the site pretty wide (1100px to be exact). For most people, it should be fine as long as you maximize your browser window. If not, get a bigger screen. <img src='http://rohjuh.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif' alt=':-D' class='wp-smiley' /> </li>
<li>New logo in preparation for a worldwide marketing launch to further brand awareness. Or not. The logo now also serves as the site&#8217;s favicon (that little icon to the left of the web address in your browser). You&#8217;ll need to clear your browser&#8217;s cache to get the new favicon.</li>
<li>Hot new nav bar. The links change when you hover over them; that&#8217;s pretty typical. What&#8217;s unique is that the <em>reflections</em> of the links also change. Cool!</li>
<li>RohJuh Shuffle is now on steroids &#8211; 6 random pics instead of one for your nostalgic pleasure. In addition, the four latest Featured Adventures are displayed.</li>
<li>The scaled gallery pics <strike>will be</strike> are nice and big at 800px wide instead of 640px <strike>(it will take some time to update all albums to the new size)</strike>.</li>
<li>Site-wide, unified search. RohJuh V4 only had search for the &#8220;blog&#8221; portion of the site and not the &#8220;gallery&#8221; portion. RohJuh V5&#8242;s search will combine these into a single search. Unfortunately, this will take more time to implement. For now, the search will remain for the blog only.</li>
</ul>
<p>I&#8217;ve done a lot of testing on my development site, but can&#8217;t fully vet through everything unless it&#8217;s on the production site. So expect some things to not work for a while as I clean everything up.</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE </strong>(Mar 19, 2008): I think I&#8217;ve got pretty much everything cleaned up. There are still some IE (6 and earlier) issues related to PNG images, but I&#8217;m so tired of kludging things for this lame browser that I&#8217;m inclined at this point to just say screw IE. If you&#8217;re using IE 6 or earlier, you really should upgrade to <a href="http://getfirefox.com">Firefox</a>, <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/">Safari</a>, or <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx">IE 7</a>. If you&#8217;re using one of these browsers and notice any strange anomalies, let me know!</p>
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		<item>
		<title>Previous &amp; Next Arrows</title>
		<link>http://rohjuh.com/2006/05/02/previous-next-arrows/</link>
		<comments>http://rohjuh.com/2006/05/02/previous-next-arrows/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 May 2006 15:58:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Roger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Site]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://rohjuh.com/2006/05/02/previous-next-arrows/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[PALO ALTO, Calif., &#8211; May 02, 2006 (BUSINESS WIRE) &#8211; RohJuh.com, one of the primiere destinations on the internet for worthless articles, pictures, and video, today announced revolutionary new functionality for its users. With the introduction of Pop-Up Arrows&#8482;, users are no longer required to click on the &#8220;prev&#8221; and &#8220;next&#8221; text to advance from [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="centered" src="http://rohjuh.com/av/2006/next_arrow.jpg" alt="" /></p>
<p>PALO ALTO, Calif., &#8211; May 02, 2006 (BUSINESS WIRE) &#8211; RohJuh.com, one of the primiere destinations on the internet for worthless articles, pictures, and video, today announced revolutionary new functionality for its users. With the introduction of Pop-Up Arrows&trade;, users are no longer required to click on the &#8220;prev&#8221; and &#8220;next&#8221; text to advance from photo to photo. Instead, they can advance to the next photo simply by clicking on the right half of the current photo. Similarly, they can go back to the previous photo by clicking on the left half of the current photo. When their mouse pointer is positioned over the photo, an arrow &#8220;pops-up&#8221; on the photo providing the user with intuitive visual guidance (see accompanying graphic).</p>
<p>RohJuh.com&#8217;s users are not very bright as evidenced by the <a href="http://rohjuh.com/2006/03/06/awstats-site-statistics/">high levels of site visits</a> via Internet Explorer. Fortunately, RohJuh.com&#8217;s brilliant engineers were able to design the Pop-Up Arrows&trade; to be virtually idiot-proof. Thus, even Internet Explorer users should find the new functionality intuitive and easy to use.</p>
<p>&#8220;While other sites continue the rest on their laurels, RohJuh.com continues to innovate and enhance the experience of its users,&#8221; said RohJuh.com&#8217;s CEO (Chief Everything Officer) Roger Hsu. &#8220;All three of our users have clamored for an easier way to wade through RohJuh.com&#8217;s endless pages of meaningless photos and videos. We&#8217;ve patiently listened to their mindless blatherings and have not only addressed their concerns, but have done so in a manner that is extremely intuitive, easy-to-use, and fun! This new functionality not only empowers our users to waste more time than ever before, but also to do so in a highly efficient manner.&#8221;</p>
<p>RohJuh.com&#8217;s Pop-Up Arrows&trade; functionality is available immediately and free of charge, although donations are always accepted.</p>
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		<title>RohJuh on Roids!</title>
		<link>http://rohjuh.com/2006/03/21/rohjuh-on-roids/</link>
		<comments>http://rohjuh.com/2006/03/21/rohjuh-on-roids/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 Mar 2006 16:43:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Roger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Geek/Tech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Site]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://rohjuh.com/2006/03/21/rohjuh-on-roids/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Roids??? Huh? Everything about the site still looks the same. In fact it looks exactly the same. So what&#8217;s different? Well, you may have noticed that the site felt a bit different when you first arrived. You&#8217;ll likely notice a difference when you&#8217;re browsing through pics, and you&#8217;ll almost definitely notice something different when you&#8217;re [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Roids??? Huh? Everything about the site still <em>looks</em> the same. In fact it looks <em>exactly</em> the same. So what&#8217;s different? Well, you may have noticed that the site <em>felt</em> a bit different when you first arrived. You&#8217;ll likely notice a difference when you&#8217;re browsing through pics, and you&#8217;ll almost definitely notice something different when you&#8217;re viewing videos.</p>
<p>What the heck am I talking about? I&#8217;m talking about SPEED, lots of it! As of today, RohJuh.com  is being served from a commercial hosting provider instead of my home Mac.</p>
<p>As I&#8217;ve <a href="http://rohjuh.com/2006/01/16/back-online/">complained</a> about at <a href="http://rohjuh.com/2005/09/07/v4/">various</a> <a href="http://rohjuh.com/2005/07/13/1995-dsl/">times</a> in the <a href="http://rohjuh.com/2005/02/01/sbc-dsl-woes/">past</a>, most ISP (internet service providers) cap the upload speeds on home internet connections. Prior to today, RohJuh.com resided on my home Mac. Thus, anything that is requested from the site (text, pics, vids) must be uploaded from my home Mac to the end user, and is thereby restricted by that very limited uplink. For text it&#8217;s no big deal at all. For scaled pics, it is somewhat bothersome, and for vids and full-size pics, it can be downright annoying! I&#8217;m not sure what my uplink is now with my hosting provider, but it is likely more than an order of magnitude better than my home DSL. Whereas the bottleneck before was my home DSL&#8217;s <em>upload</em> speed, the bottleneck now will likely be <em>your download</em> speed.<span id="more-154"></span></p>
<p>So why do this now? Why didn&#8217;t I just go straight to a hoster 5 years ago when RohJuh.com first launched? Simple. 5 years ago, you could get maybe 100MB of disk for $20 a month (I don&#8217;t recall the exact rates at the time, but that&#8217;s not too far off base). Not only did I not want to fork up another $20/month, but 100MB simply wasn&#8217;t enough room for all the worthless pics that I wanted to  put up on the site.</p>
<p><strong>Bang for Your Buck</strong><br />
It&#8217;s amazing how much things change in the span of 5 short years. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law">Moore&#8217;s Law</a> looks to be alive and well in the hosting industry. Check out this comparison:</p>
<p>CY2000<br />
100MB (estimate from memory)<br />
$20/mo (estimate from memory)</p>
<p>CY2006<br />
20GB (that&#8217;s a &#8220;G&#8221; as in Gigabyte)<br />
$7.95/mo</p>
<p>That&#8217;s what Dreamhost is currently offering. Wow! Now it should be noted that companies offering such packages are clearly overselling. That means that they are counting on people using far less resources than allotted because if everyone used their complete allotment, they&#8217;d go out of business. They&#8217;ve done the calculations to know that most people will use far less than their full allotment of resources. While some people are vehemently opposed to overselling, I don&#8217;t mind it as long as my site&#8217;s overall performance is not adversely affected in a noticeable way.</p>
<p><strong>Overall Cost</strong><br />
Performance advantages aside, I wanted to know how much moving to a hoster would really cost me so I ran some calculations. In order to run a server from home, it needs to be always on. A reasonable estimate is that my iMac uses 100W of power while on. A reasonable electricity rate is $0.08/kW hr. Some simple math results in $5.76/mo in electricity costs for my iMac running 24/7. Of course, I&#8217;ll still be using my computer for normal purposes so let&#8217;s estimate I use my Mac for 4 hours/day. Taking that amount out, that means that I&#8217;ll be paying $4.80 more per month to leave my Mac on 24/7. That&#8217;s almost the cost of hosting right there!</p>
<p>It gets better. Currently, I&#8217;m paying $20/year to have my custom email at rohjuh.com. I&#8217;m also paying $9 or so a year for the domain name rohjuh.com. With many hosting packages, including the one from Dreamhost, I get both of these for free.</p>
<p>But wait, there&#8217;s more! I&#8217;ll also be getting a secure, off-site backup. I&#8217;ve invested a lot time and energy into RohJuh.com so backups are very important. An offsite backup offers an additional level of security and peace of mind.</p>
<p><strong>Hosting Requirements and the Contenders</strong><br />
The argument for moving from a home server to a hosted environment was obviously very compelling. I decided to go for it. The next step was to find a host that met my needs. I quickly discovered that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of different hosts to choose from.</p>
<p>My hosting criteria were:</p>
<ul>
<li>Unix/Linux &#038; Apache (no problem here as this is the most popular hosting platform)</li>
<li>PHP &#038; MySQL (again, no problem as you&#8217;d be hard pressed to find a host who <em>didn&#8217;t</em> offer these)</li>
<li>Minimum 11GB disk (preferably 12 or more)</li>
<li>WordPress &#038; Gallery2 (I wanted to know that these could run and run well)</li>
<li>IMAP email with no disk limits other than your total alloted disk space</li>
<li>Generally reputable company that&#8217;s been in business for a while</li>
<li>SSH (secure access through a command-line/terminal &#8211; this is necessary to compile, install, and run certain things like AWStats. It also makes many tasks much quicker and easier.)</li>
</ul>
<p>I spent some time on WebHostingTalk.com to read about people&#8217;s experiences with various hosts. After wading through a bunch of reviews, my list narrowed to Dreamhost, Site5, PowWeb, and Mid-Phase.</p>
<p>I eliminated Mid-Phase because as I dug deeper, it seemed like they had a history of recurring customer complaints. Pow-Web has a lame 100MB limit on email storage plus several complaints about slow performance with Gallery2 so I eliminated them as well.</p>
<p><strong>Dreamhost and Site5</strong><br />
My short short list came down to Dreamhost and Site5, both of which were generally highly regarded and have been in business for several years (since 1995 for Dreamhost). I ended up going with Dreamhost because of their superior disk space, 20GB (+ weekly increases of 160MB) vs. 11GB at Site5. All the files that comprise RohJuh.com plus all my saved emails totalled around 10.5GB. With Site 5, I&#8217;d be pushing up against the limits right off the bat whereas with Dreamhost, I had a lot of extra room. Further, Dreamhost has a fantastic deal where you only pay $22.40 for your first year!</p>
<p>While Dreamhost had been in business for a while and generally had a good reputation, they seemed to be going through some problems. Apparently, they were attracting many new users because of their fantastic offer and weren&#8217;t quite able to keep up with the sudden growth. I monitored the situation for a while on the Dreamhost public forums (which was another plus for Dreamhost because many hosts do not even have a public forum and of those that do, many censor the messages that are posted).</p>
<p>For a while, there were lots of complaints about poor speeds and performance. I took this with the appropriate grain of salt because I knew that people who are having problems are typically the most vocal; those whose sites were working well generally didn&#8217;t hang around and post on the forums. I figured all hosting providers will have the occasional hiccup; the important thing is how they addressed those issues. It wasn&#8217;t long before the performance issues with Dreamhost subsided. I decided to take the plunge and sign up. Dreamhost offers an industry-leading 97 day money-back guarantee so the risk was low in case I wasn&#8217;t satisfied.</p>
<p><strong>Moving the Site</strong><br />
Account activation was relatively painless. Next, I needed a good FTP program in order to upload all the necessary files from my home Mac to the remote Dreamhost server. I quickly decided on the highly acclaimed <a href="http://www.interarchy.com/">Interarchy</a> ($39) which has received numerous glowing reviews for its functionality, power, and stability. One of the nice features of Interarchy is that it has powerful mirroring and syncing capabilities. Even though Dreamhost maintains backups, it is always a good idea to maintain backups yourself. With Interarchy, I can easily set things up so that my local Mac always has an exact mirror of the live site at Dreamhost.</p>
<p>Uploading the files took quite a long time. The total size of all my files (website and email) was around 10.5GB. Considering my DSL upload speed of around 300Kbps, that meant the total transfer time would be around 77.78 hours or 3.24 <em>days</em>! Yikes!</p>
<p>The transfer went relatively smoothly. I had to deal with a few idiosyncrasies of Dreamhost (such as the way MySQL databases are set up), but for the most part, there weren&#8217;t too many gotchas. The main problem I had was getting ffmpeg to work properly. ffmpeg is used by Gallery2 to process video files (extract the size of the video and create thumbnails). For some reason, I couldn&#8217;t get ffmpeg to process Quicktime 7 files which I definitely want to use because of its fantastic quality to compression ratio. I still haven&#8217;t got this working on my Dreamhost site so until I can figure things out, I&#8217;ll have to manually create my thumbnails of videos that I add (old videos already on the site are not affected).</p>
<p><strong>IMAP Email</strong><br />
My other reason for transferring the site is that I wanted to set up Judy&#8217;s and my email for IMAP. Previously, we were using POP email in which our email was received by a remote server and then downloaded to our home computer. After a while, the email was deleted from the remote server. All our saved emails and folders were present on the home computer. Although we could check our email while away from home (such as from work), we could not access any of our old emails nor did we have access to any of our email folders.</p>
<p>With IMAP email, all the emails and folders are stored remotely and your local computer simply reads that info. Since the emails are centrally stored, you have access to all your old emails and folders regardless of where you are.</p>
<p>Since all of our emails for the last few years were based on POP, I needed a way to be able to convert all those saved messages into a format that I could transfer to Dreamhost. Dreamhost uses the Maildir format and all our mail messages were stored in the OS X Mail mbox format. I found a handy conversion tool called <a href="http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/index.html">Emailchemy</a> ($25) which was able to do this conversion. After figuring out some of the idiosyncrasies of Maildir, I was able to successfully transfer all our old emails and configure our mail clients for IMAP.</p>
<p>RohJuh.com is now live on the Dreamhost servers and the web server on my home Mac has been shut down. The name servers have been changed and should fully propogate in the next day or two. I&#8217;ve been really happy with the performance so far, especially when I&#8217;m at work. Since TiVo has a really, really fast internet connection (broadbandreports.com showed an insanely fast 30Mbps download transfer rate), video files download ridiculously fast. Even at home with my ~1.2Mbps download, things feel much more zippy. Now we just need to get out there and start creating some new video content! <img src='http://rohjuh.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
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		<title>AWStats Site Statistics</title>
		<link>http://rohjuh.com/2006/03/06/awstats-site-statistics/</link>
		<comments>http://rohjuh.com/2006/03/06/awstats-site-statistics/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Mar 2006 06:26:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Roger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Geek/Tech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Site]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://rohjuh.com/2006/03/06/awstats-site-statistics/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Yowzers! Web development can sure suck up gobs of time! I set out this past weekend to install AWStats, a popular web statistics analysis package. It was supposed to be a relatively straightforward affair. Suffice it to say that it took a bit longer than I expected (surprise, surprise!). After encountering several issues, consulting with [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Yowzers! Web development can sure suck up gobs of time! I set out this past weekend to install <a href="http://awstats.sourceforge.net/">AWStats</a>, a popular web statistics analysis package. It was supposed to be a relatively straightforward affair. Suffice it to say that it took a bit longer than I expected (surprise, surprise!). After encountering several issues, consulting with my personal <a href="http://tuft.org">computer guru</a>, and doing a fair share of Googling, I was finally able to figure things out and get things working.</p>
<p>I had saved all my log files since RohJuh&#8217;s inception back in 2001, but unfortunately, it wasn&#8217;t until December of last year (2005) that I realized my web server had been recording its logs in a less-than-optimal format. I had been recording things in the Apache &#8220;common&#8221; format which is the default setting in OS X. The common format records rudimentary things like page visits and IP numbers, but that info is not very interesting. The &#8220;combined&#8221; format is where it&#8217;s at. It records things like the visitor&#8217;s operating system and browser, which hits are from robots/spiders, where people are coming to the site from, and other interesting info. The nice thing is that AWStats can generate a report combining each format, although you have to make sure you go through the extra step of processing each format separately.</p>
<p>Now that I can view the site stats in a clear and graphical way, I&#8217;m embarrassed to find that the audience of RohJuh is not as technically sophisticated as I had thought. A whopping 48% of RohJuh&#8217;s visitors are using the wretched MS Internet Explorer. Quite ghastly indeed! Maybe a better way to look at things, the glass half full approach, is to note that 48% is far lower than the <a href="http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=3">latest reported IE marketshare</a> of 85%.</p>
<p>You may be asking what&#8217;s the point of all this? Why waste, errrr&#8230; spend, the time to install this stuff? After all, why does a rinky-dink site like RohJuh.com need a fancy web statistics analysis tool anyway? The answer? Because I can. Ha! C&#8217;mon, since when have geeks needed good reasons to do geeky things? <img src='http://rohjuh.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
<p>Anyhow, here are <a href="http://rohjuh.com/awstats/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=rohjuh.com">the stats</a>. I&#8217;ll also be putting a link to them in the &#8220;about&#8221; section.</p>
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		<title>Back Online</title>
		<link>http://rohjuh.com/2006/01/16/back-online/</link>
		<comments>http://rohjuh.com/2006/01/16/back-online/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Jan 2006 06:51:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Roger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Site]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://rohjuh.com/2006/01/16/back-online/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It took much longer than I would have liked, but RohJuh.com is finally back online. SBC (now AT&#038;T) is the culprit for the delay. Our new phone service was supposed to begin on Jan 03, but I couldn&#8217;t do the online sign up for DSL (I wanted to get the cheaper rate) until the phone [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>It took much longer than I would have liked, but RohJuh.com is finally back online. SBC (now AT&#038;T) is the culprit for the delay. Our new phone service was supposed to begin on Jan 03, but I couldn&#8217;t do the online sign up for DSL (I wanted to get the cheaper rate) until the phone service was active. So I waited until Jan 03 to sign up for DSL. On that day, I discovered to my dismay that even though my phone service was active, it apparently wasn&#8217;t &#8220;in the system&#8221; yet &#8211; that would take another couple of days.</p>
<p>It wasn&#8217;t until Jan 05 that SBC&#8217;s system was properly updated, enabling me to sign up online for DSL. As I was signing in, I had the option of choosing the DSL Pro service. Awesome! I&#8217;ve been wanting the Pro service for some time due to its faster download as well as upload speeds. I committed to a 6-month contract of the Pro service for $21.99/mo. My order was processed, I received email confirmation, and I tracked the status daily. My activation date was going to be Jan 12. We moved on Jan 07 so it would be less than a week without internet access. Far from ideal, but bearable.<span id="more-141"></span></p>
<p>On Jan 09, I received an email from SBC informing me that the DSL speed I had ordered was not available at my address. I was too far from the CO. Lame! Why let me sign up for the Pro service in the first place if it wasn&#8217;t available? I figured they would simply just give me the lower speed DSL Express instead. Not wanting to leave anything to chance, I decided to call to confirm. Good thing I did because I was told that since the original service tier I ordered was not available, my order was cancelled. If I still wanted the DSL Express service, I&#8217;d have to place my order again and get back in the activation queue. WTF? How lame is that?!</p>
<p>So I placed my order again and had to wait about 5 business days for the service to be activated. Today was the activation day. Fortunately, I was able to get things up and running without much of a hitch. I am now happily surfing the net again from home and RohJuh.com is once again live. It&#8217;s pretty amazing how much the internet has become a part of our lives, at least for me. I was getting some pretty bad withdrawal symptoms! <img src='http://rohjuh.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
<p>I was hoping for some faster speeds because our new address is closer to the CO:<br />
14,600 ft (old place in Belmont)<br />
11,898 ft (new place in Palo Alto)<br />
< 9,500 ft required for Pro service</p>
<p>So far, broadbandreports.com indicates that my speeds are comparable to those I was getting at our Belmont residence. I&#8217;m still optimistic, however because the modem supposedly performs some optimization routines over the course of a few days to maximize speeds. Hopefully I&#8217;ll see some further improvements as in the coming weeks.</p>
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		<title>BikeBlogs.com</title>
		<link>http://rohjuh.com/2005/10/17/bikeblogscom/</link>
		<comments>http://rohjuh.com/2005/10/17/bikeblogscom/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Oct 2005 15:46:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Roger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Mountain Biking]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Site]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://rohjuh.com/2005/10/17/bikeblogscom/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I was just Googling around and found this link to RohJuh.com. They highlight our San Juan Huts trip: Gotta check this blog out&#8230; RohJuh.com. They have a couple great posts on their San Juan Hut Trip. Also, check out their gallery for lots of great pics. I&#8217;m not sure how they found out about RohJuh.com, [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I was just Googling around and found this link to RohJuh.com. They highlight our San Juan Huts trip:</p>
<blockquote><p>Gotta check this blog out&#8230; RohJuh.com. They have a couple great posts on their San Juan Hut Trip. Also, check out their gallery for lots of great pics.</p></blockquote>
<p>I&#8217;m not sure how they found out about RohJuh.com, but somehow they did. Pretty cool. Here&#8217;s the <a href="http://bikeblogs.blogs.com/main/2005/10/1032005_updates.html">link</a>.</p>
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		<title>The Making of V4</title>
		<link>http://rohjuh.com/2005/10/05/the-making-of-v4/</link>
		<comments>http://rohjuh.com/2005/10/05/the-making-of-v4/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Oct 2005 18:58:11 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Roger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Geek/Tech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Site]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://rohjuh.com/2005/10/05/the-making-of-v4/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Version 4 of RohJuh.com ended up being a much more time-consuming endeavor than I ever imagined. With development work progressing at a fairly consistent pace over nearly 9 months, what began as a medium-scale project soon mushroomed into quite a large undertaking, and I ended up spending about quadruple the amount of time and effort [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Version 4 of RohJuh.com ended up being a much more time-consuming endeavor than I ever imagined. With development work progressing at a fairly consistent pace over nearly 9 months, what began as a medium-scale project soon mushroomed into quite a large undertaking, and I ended up spending about quadruple the amount of time and effort that I had originally estimated. Good thing my day job isn&#8217;t software program management. <img src='http://rohjuh.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
<p>With Version 3, I had completely over-hauled the site in an attempt to separate the content from the presentation (translation: to make it easier to change the look and feel of the site) as well as to facilitate content management (translation: to make it easier to add new trip reports, pics, and videos). I largely achieved this objective as V3 was much improved in these regards from previous versions. Despite these improvements, there remained a number of areas that were still lacking.<span id="more-127"></span></p>
<p><strong>Content Addition/Management</strong><br />
Even with the V3 improvements, adding content remained a very manual process and involved more steps than I would have liked. Adding pictures involved exporting the pics from iPhoto (my photo management software), using a separate program to create captions, thumbnails, and scaled pics, and finally copying and pasting the resulting HTML code to a text file which would include the trip report, if there was one. After that, I&#8217;d have to go into the MySQL database and create a new entry for the page in addition to all its accompanying parameters (page title, date, description, etc.).</p>
<p>Although pages were dynamically generated and the look and feel could be easily changed, aspects of much of the content remained static HTML code which  greatly reduces flexibility. For example, thumbnail sizes were fixed and were set at 4 to a row. If I ever wanted to change this site-wide, I&#8217;d pretty much have to modify each individual page.</p>
<p><strong>Slideshow &#038; Access to Original Pics</strong><br />
In V3, thumbnails were displayed and if you wanted to see a bigger version, you click on the thumbnail. But there lacked a slideshow functionality (where you can click &#8220;next&#8221; to get to the next pic). In addition, visitors could not access the original, full-size pics. I really wanted to have this functionality.</p>
<p><strong>Visitor Comments</strong><br />
I implemented the Forums in V3 to allow people to comment on pics and trip reports. Granted, very few people leave comments on a site like this anyway, but I still thought that it would be a nice feature to have. I guess it&#8217;s more of a &#8220;that&#8217;s cool even if nobody uses it&#8221; type of thing. But aside from the fact that most visitors to RohJuh are not prone to comment on anything, the full-featured Forums were just overkill for the original intent. More importantly, the lack of integration between the actual trip report and the Forums only served to make comments even less likely.</p>
<p><strong>Search</strong><br />
This was a big one, especially as content continued to be added to the site. I wanted to have search capability to allow myself and visitors alike a quick and easy way to find what they&#8217;re looking for.</p>
<p><strong>Security</strong><br />
After several instances of hackers defacing the Forums (they were rarely used and thus I never kept up with all the security updates), I realized that the entire site could potentially be at risk, especially since I was using home-grown PHP and MySQL code. I&#8217;m not a professional programmer so my code is quite likely not up to snuff, and I certainly didn&#8217;t have the time nor inclination to keep up with all the latest in keeping things hacker-proof.  That type of stuff does not interest me at all; I&#8217;d rather focus on content and the front-facing design and aesthetic aspects of the site.</p>
<p><strong>Make or Buy</strong><br />
To add all of the functionality that I wanted, I could spend lots of my time deep in code and come up with  a custom solution. That certainly wasn&#8217;t something I wanted to do, and even if I did, I&#8217;d have to become much better versed with the security ins and outs of PHP and MySQL to help protect the site from hackers.</p>
<p>So that was Option 1 and it wasn&#8217;t all that appealing to me at all. Option 2 was to use an available, off-the-shelf solution. The final decision really was a no-brainer since there are several, well-supported open-source projects that would let give me all the functionality that I desired and then some. Since most of these programs are free, it made the decision all the easier. So I guess it wasn&#8217;t really a &#8220;Make or Buy&#8221; decision per se, but more of a &#8220;Make or Get for Free&#8221; decision.</p>
<p><strong>Gallery2</strong><br />
RohJuh.com&#8217;s largely about the pictures so obviously a good photo-management software would be required.  There are quite a few options available with the two most popular ones being Coppermine and Gallery. I looked into both offerings, but Gallery seemed to be a much more active project. In addition, there was lots of buzz around the project because they were nearing completion of their next generation software, Gallery2. Gallery2 was a ground-up rewrite with the objective of creating a highly scalable, efficient, customizable, and full featured photo management software. I decided to base RohJuh.com&#8217;s photo management software on Gallery2.</p>
<p><strong>WordPress</strong><br />
For content like trip reports and static pages, the available choices are virtually endless but generally boiled down into two types: a full-blown content management system (a la Drupal, Mambo, the Nuke  families, etc.) or a blogging type system (a la WordPress, TypePad, MovableType, etc.). Because of the  relatively simple nature of RohJuh.com&#8217;s content, a full-featured content management system was not necessary; the comparatively simple blog software would suffice.</p>
<p>In researching the various blog software available, I quickly settled on WordPress. WordPress has garnered significant industry praise for its ease of use as well as its functionality. The project has a very active and involved developer community and also a highly active support and plugin community (plugins are modules that people write that can be plugged into the main WordPress program to provide additional functionality). In addition, the next version of WordPress would have &#8220;Pages&#8221; functionality which allows you to create static pages in addition to blog entries. For most people this functionality would be used to create relatively static pages like &#8220;About&#8221; and &#8220;Contact&#8221; pages.</p>
<p><strong>Implementation</strong><br />
By the end of 2004, I had decided to base the new RohJuh.com on WordPress and Gallery2 (aka G2). At that time, WordPress was on the verge of releasing version 1.5, a fairly major update to the software. G2 was in the Alpha release stage and my expectation was that it would be only a few months before the final  version of G2 was released.</p>
<p>Shortly after moving to Northern California, I installed WordPress and G2 on my home Mac and began  familiarizing myself with the software. I also began designing the new look and feel of the site. Both WordPress and G2 come with default &#8220;themes&#8221; (a set of files to define the look and feel), but I wanted a  custom look, not the plain-Jane vanilla default.</p>
<p>I can be a perfectionist when it comes to certain things and creating a new look for the site is most definitely one of those things. As with previous versions of the site, I spent countless hours creating new looks, changing them, scrapping them for a new one, etc., etc., .etc. After finally deciding on the desired general look (with many subsequent tweaks to details to come), I was ready to start implementing the look I wanted within the confines of WordPress and G2.</p>
<p><strong>WordPress Customization</strong><br />
The WordPress team has done a fantastic job in making customization easy and straightforward. All relevant files to a certain theme are stored in a single directory and controlled by a single CSS file. Things are structured in a very logical and sensible manner. As a testament to this ease of use, there were dozens of available themes to choose from shortly after WordPress 1.5 was introduced. I perused dozens of themes, trying to find one that I liked. Not able to find one that I completely like, I set about trying to find one that was kind of close so that I could use it as a starting point for modification. I came upon the Wuhan theme which was the closest one available, and soon set about modifying the Wuhan theme files to get my custom look. As you can see, the final result is quite different from the Wuhan theme; I modified that theme quite extensively to get the look I wanted.</p>
<p>The process went relatively smoothly, which is not to say that it didn&#8217;t take lots of time. Aside from the usual headaches and frustrations with Internet Explorer (why the heck does anybody still use this browser???) related  to its poor standards compliance, a fully functioning WordPress implementation with my own custom theme was soon up and running.</p>
<p><strong>Gallery2 Customization</strong><br />
While the WordPress customization process went reasonably well, the G2 customization process was vastly different. While the G2 developers have done a great job of creating a highly functional piece of software, they are definitely lacking in user interface and usability (and they admit as much). I started with the Alpha 4 version of the software which was the first version in which an upgrade path to successive versions was assured (i.e. you would not lose your data with successive upgrades). Unfortunately, I found G2 very confusing to customize. There were CSS files and template files scattered among various directories. In some instances, certain files had the same exact filename but resided in different directories! Aye carumba!</p>
<p>In addition to the G2 customization, I also I spent a lot of time moving all the old picture galleries to the new software. This was a very manual and laborious process, especially with the captions. Basically, I had to copy and paste each caption from each picture into the software. That wasn&#8217;t a whole lot of fun. I should have tried to outsource this task to some cheap worker in China or India. <img src='http://rohjuh.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
<p>As the import process went on over the course of several months, I continued to customize G2 to get the look I wanted and the open-source development of G2 continued. Many things in the program were still fluid and bugs continued to be worked out. Beta 1 was released March 04, 2005. With the release of Beta 2 on April 12, 2005 came a complete revamp of the theme system. This was much needed since the previous theming system was, quite frankly, lacking in many ways, but it also meant that much of my previous work would have to be redone to one extent or another. [sigh] Such is life working on the bleeding edge of software.</p>
<p>Beta 3 was released on May 18, Beta 4 on July 22,  RC (Release Candidate) 1 on Aug 05, RC2 on Aug 24, and the final release on Sep 13. The total release cycle took much longer than I expected, but that was due mainly to my false expectations. The G2 developers never promised a final release date and considering that they work essentially for free (donations are accepted) in their spare time, the release cycle wasn&#8217;t really all that long.</p>
<p>It was kind of cool to be a part of the process and see firsthand how an open-source project moves along. Code is released for people to try out. People install the software, play around with it, and make suggestions to improve things. When they encounter problems, they post in the support forum and the developers and other users would try to help troubleshoot things. Verified bugs are tracked online as are the multitudes of feature requests. Bug fixes are rolled back into the main codebase and features are added incrementally. While the process may seem kind of unorderly and chaotic, in the end, the problems eventually get worked out, the most desired features are added, and the resultant software is generally pretty good quality.</p>
<p>So that&#8217;s the story of RohJuh.com V4. It was the culmination of many months of labor, some of it fun, some of it not so fun. I&#8217;m very pleased with the result, and RohJuh.com finally has a solid foundation for the future. I&#8217;ll probably change the look every now and then, but definitely don&#8217;t foresee the need to do any further major revamps to the back-end anytime soon. That is, of course, as long as WordPress and Gallery2 continue to be well-supported projects which, by all indications, should be a fairly safe bet. Now with the new site finally complete, it&#8217;s time to get away from my computer screen and get back to creating content for the site! <img src='http://rohjuh.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
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		<title>Speed Boost</title>
		<link>http://rohjuh.com/2005/09/15/speed-boost/</link>
		<comments>http://rohjuh.com/2005/09/15/speed-boost/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 16 Sep 2005 05:13:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Roger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Site]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://rohjuh.com/2005/09/15/speed-boost/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As of tonight, you should notice a fairly significant speed boost while browsing pictures. Since the introduction of RohJuh.com V4, all scaled pics (the thumbnails as well as the 640X480 resized pics) have been scaled at 100% image quality. This resulted in fairly large image sizes (from a file size standpoint). After some experimentation, I [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>As of tonight, you should notice a fairly significant speed boost while browsing pictures. Since the introduction of RohJuh.com V4, all scaled pics (the thumbnails as well as the 640X480 resized pics) have been scaled at 100% image quality. This resulted in fairly large image sizes (from a file size standpoint).</p>
<p>After some experimentation, I found that a setting of 80% image quality results in significantly smaller file sizes, but with only a barely noticeable degradation in image quality. Placed side by side in a blind comparison, it is unlikely that any but the most discerning eye would notice a difference. Typical file sizes for the 640X480 resized pics have been reduced on average by 75+%, from ~300-350 KB down to ~70-90 KB. That means that the time it takes to transfer a pic from the RohJuh web server to your computer should be about 4 times faster than before. I&#8217;ve tested this with an off-site computer and the difference is substantial. Stepping through pictures is now a much more pleasant experience! <img src='http://rohjuh.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif' alt=':-)' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
<p>My iMac spent the better part of today rescaling all the pics (over 11,000 so it took a while!). Now, everything&#8217;s good to go. Unfortunately, the speed boost does not affect the full-size pics or movies since these are in their original formats and not scaled. The only way the transfer speeds of those will improve is with faster broadband. <img src='http://rohjuh.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_sad.gif' alt=':-(' class='wp-smiley' /> </p>
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		<title>V4</title>
		<link>http://rohjuh.com/2005/09/07/v4/</link>
		<comments>http://rohjuh.com/2005/09/07/v4/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 07 Sep 2005 07:05:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Roger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Site]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://rohjuh.com/2005/09/07/v4/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Just when you thought the web was safe, RohJuh.com V4 is unleashed! Radically overhauled from the inside out, RohJuh.com is bigger, badder, and better than ever. Aside from the whopping 10 GB of time-wasting content, what&#8217;s new with V4? Well, there&#8217;s: A totally new and original look. Ain&#8217;t it purrrty? A complete overhaul of the [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Just when you thought the web was safe, RohJuh.com V4 is unleashed! Radically overhauled from the inside out, RohJuh.com is bigger, badder, and better than ever. Aside from the whopping 10 GB of time-wasting content, what&#8217;s new with V4? Well, there&#8217;s:</p>
<ul>
<li>A totally new and original look. Ain&#8217;t it purrrty?</li>
<li>A complete overhaul of the back-end (again), this time with a true content management system. That means faster and more frequent updates (as is, I think, pretty evident).</li>
<li>New pics including the San Juan Huts, NY/NJ, heli-boarding, Judy&#8217;s new car, our new abode, Latte Dog, and more!</li>
<li>New movies including some nice snowboarding jumps as well as a shining example of how *not* to do a rail slide.</li>
<li>Old pics previously not online from Powder Mountain, Telluride, and Hawaii (a fun blast from the past &#8211; there&#8217;s some real gems there!)</li>
<li>The replacement of the Forums with a direct commenting system.</li>
<li>Site search.</li>
<li>RohJuh Shuffle &#8211; random pics displayed on the front page.</li>
</ul>
<p>The only bad thing is that my new DSL has half the upload speed as my San Diego line &#8211; I&#8217;m too far from the central office. <img src='http://rohjuh.com/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_sad.gif' alt=':-(' class='wp-smiley' />  It&#8217;s not that big a deal for pics, but the movies may take a bit longer to load. Hey SBC, hurry up with that fiber project!</p>
<p>Enjoy!</p>
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		<title>V4 Soft Launch</title>
		<link>http://rohjuh.com/2005/08/31/v4-soft-launch/</link>
		<comments>http://rohjuh.com/2005/08/31/v4-soft-launch/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Sep 2005 04:34:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Roger</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Site]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://rohjuh.com/2005/08/31/v4-soft-launch/</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Today was the &#8220;soft launch&#8221; of RohJuh.com Version 4.0. That just means that the new version is what people see when they go to RohJuh.com. However, since few people visit the site on a regular basis (people generally only visit when I inform them of something new), the site won&#8217;t be seeing a lot of [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Today was the &#8220;soft launch&#8221; of RohJuh.com Version 4.0. That just means that the new version is what people see when they go to RohJuh.com. However, since few people visit the site on a regular basis (people generally only visit when I inform them of something new), the site won&#8217;t be seeing a lot of traffic. So this is basically a beta test phase that gives me a bit more time to iron out any kinks before the official release.</p>
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