Warning: Long Rant

Just finished the new ‘front page’ for my Fred-Lin.com today. It’s a simple and clean layout that introduces me, what I do, and more importantly, my 3 sites. Please don’t mind the hard-sell, because it’s meant to be that way. I was initially planning on doing something flashy, but considering my recent research and stuff, decided to go against it, and make everything flat XHTML/CSS. The reasons are simple, for a better identity on search engines. Search engines practically ignore all content on Flash movies, despite google’s claims that they can now detect basic text and stuff in Flash movies, I think its bullshit. Flash sites only show at best a title and brief description in google/any other search engines. So if you have libraries of information beautifully presented with a bells and whistles, sorry it will never be able to be searched by users. ie. my current Fred Lin Music. (hence I am planning to switch it to a non flash site soon.)

Infact, Fred Lin Music had the most traffic during its wordpress days, the previous layout. That was so searchable I had my songs all indexed in baidu, and downloaded for free, resulting in over 10 gigs of bandwidth a month. People looking for Lee Hom’s kiss goodbye would end up at my site! People looking for Christian Batista’s The Way You Look At Me would end up at my site! Anyways, you get the picture.

Just when I thought my housekeeping days were done. See, I’ve been doing alot of housekeeping/book-keeping on my ’stuff’ these few days. It included me fixing up my cell phone, getting all my contacts back on it, backing up, getting my music production software up to speed, etc. Thing was, it was actually ALL completed! I had everything where I wanted them to be. I had a huge sigh of relief. Everything was going well!

Just moments ago, my USB thumb drive appeared as unformatted. Fuck. It contains all my recent web work which I store on it for mobility’s sake. Double fuck. Good news is, I have a back up of my web projects as it was on November 18 2008. The Bad news, since Nov 18, I have done alot of web stuff. Some better news is, I am in the process of scanning the drive and am able to retrieve most if not all of the lost data. Bad news to balance that piece of good news, the data can only be restored with its filename, folder information is not recoverable for this instance. AGRH.

Anyways, it is a lesson to me, because I have had the strongest urge/feeling/6th sense to backup my web projects thumb drive for the past week, but kept procrastinating. I probably felt that way because I knew about the sheer importance of the contents on that drive. Ok, point taken. I will back up every few days. From now on.

Anyways, my web projects are nearly all done, I received a wake up call from Singapore this morning, God’s answer to my daily prayers. It was from a good friend of mine whom I helped out with a bunch of kids a couple years back. He has a music job for me. That means, February’s rent is going to be settled. THANK YOU GOD. Now I need to scramble on my feet back to *Music Production Mode*, because to be frank, I HAVEN’T BEEN PLAYING THE PIANO LEST TO SAY MUSIC PRODUCTION FOR THE PAST 3 MONTHS!!!

But anyways, some things, like riding a bicycle, once you’ve learnt how to do it, you’ll never forget it. I hope Clement doesn’t read this post.

Hope things continue to go well for me! God Bless!