New “About me” page

about_me_new.jpg

The long due update for the “About me” page has finally been done
today. I’ve not changed it since my Monash University days and I took
some time out to write some new stuff in there to reflect my current
status. Like all “About me” pages, it might seem a little
self-indulgant, so don’t read it unless you don’t mind “About me”
pages. πŸ™‚

Read it here [sixthseal.com] or at the persistant sidebar.

I have to go out now, later people!

The Weblog Review – The Imdateless.Com Website

Original review done for The Weblog Review:
The Weblog Review [theweblogreview.com].

dateless.jpg

The Imdateless.Com Website

The first thing I thought when I saw ImDateless.com is that it’s one of those match
making sites. The banner ad on the bottom of the splash page IS from a match making
site and I was wondering how this got into The Weblog Review. The site’s splash
page uses Flash, but there is an option for a non Flash entry page. I clicked on the
Flash intro and the animation reminded me of the Star Wars intro and while it’s not
as professionally animated as some Flash animations, it has a nice charm to it. It is
entertaining, if you have Flash, I suggest you watch the animation.

When I entered into the main page, I still thought it was a dating site, but
reading on shows that it is indeed a weblog, recounting experiences of this 24 year
old part time Retail Manager and university undergraduate student. The blog is in
the news section and it makes interesting reading, if you’re into personal blogs. I
find his writing easy to read since he somewhat writes in the same style as me and
he structures his paragraphs well.

Even though this is a fairly new site, it has a lot of content from his writings. I
found that the most interesting aspect of this site. He writes about a lot of things,
from his travel diaries to religion. I particularly enjoyed reading his trips around
Europe. He writes a day by day recount of his experience traveling and that is a
major attraction of this site if you like traveling stories.

Design wise, the site navigation is a little unusual, but the Expand All and
Collapse All dynamic navigational change does help in this aspect. However, I
found the sidebar too cluttered when it’s expanded. I also found the Membership and
Shopping pages to be distracting, although I can understand the need for it, since I
pay a lot for excess bandwidth fees as well. The site’s design isn’t exactly the best
out there, but that’s not the point – the content more than makes up for this.

Back to the content, a whois lookup revealed that the domain was registered on
the 12th of August 2003 and his blog begins on the same day! Even though it seems
like there is a scant 2+ months of entries, don’t let that dissuade you from visiting –
he has a lot of other writings to occupy you for many hours. He says he is a
“ubiquitous storyteller” – and I agree, his stories would entertain you.

I’m wondering what the hell this site is doing on my computer screen though. πŸ˜‰

P/S – Read the 4th October 2003 entry if you didn’t get that one.

This site was reviewed on 2003-10-23 by sixthseal.
They felt this site belonged in the Entertainment category.
sixthseal felt that The Imdateless.Com Websit deserved a rating of 4.0

Link to site: The Imdateless.Com Website [imdateless.com].

Link to original review: The Imdateless.Com Website [theweblogreview.com].

Hello November!

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I’ve done some minor tweaking on the site to optimize it. Stats
analysis found out that the CSS sixthseal.com is pulling is
ridiculously bloated, so I removed unnecessary functions from it. There
are other aesthetic changes eg trimming the rather long blog list and
adding several blogs into the “More blogs!” that I read but never got
around to adding them. Anyway, the front page links works this way – if
I’ve linked and read you since a long time ago, the link will still be
on the front page. New blogs that I’ve just started reading recently
are added into the expanded list.

The emails for myself and veritas has also been removed to avoid the
site appearing to be too “spammy” too Googlebot. The email links are in
the About pages anyway, which I need to update since it’s way out of
date. The PoTD won’t show up in archive view mode too and neither will
the “Notable Posts”, unless they’re navigated to from a post marked
notable. I’ve rotated the sticky posts somewhat too, there are too
many. BTW, the notable posts are supposed to be the better posts in
sixthseal.com so that was why the decision was made to make it sticky.
It’s still spammy but I’m aiming for SERPs rather than PR anyway.

I’ve also added a copyright notice on every page, it wasn’t clear in
the blog before. There’s also a bit of SEO work done, thanks to Steph
[unadorned.org] of dandruff, a fellow Sarawakian (born there anyway)
who actually replied my email about how she managed to get a PageRank
7. πŸ™‚

Update:
Here’s some stats that might be of interest:

October 2003
Unique visits per day: 1397 (average) 2134 (max)

Top 3 referrers: Yahoo, Google, Erowid

#1 search string: kehidupan seorang pramugara yang terlampau (1042)
Permutations of the above accounts for half of the Top 20 keywords, with the other half being drug related search strings.

Countries:
Unresolved (37%)
Network (18%)
US Commercial (17%)
Australia (9%)
Malaysia (3%)
Singapore (3%)
US Educational (2%)
Canada (2%)
UK (2%)
Japan (1%)
Other (6%)
This is more balanced than previous stats (when I was in Melbourne) where Australian visitors dominates at around 40%.

Bandwidth used:
sixthseal.com – 12 GB
castitas.com – 9 GB

My excess bandwidth bill:
sixthseal.com – 12 GB – 5 GB = 7 GB
castitas.com – 9 GB – 5 GB = 4 GB
Total = 11 GB excess @ US$ 5 per GB
Amount = US$ 55 or RM 209

RM 209 is more than 1/7 of my monthly paycheck. Help! :p

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