Wesley's Tool-Box

Apple held a big press event yesterday, introducing new products like iPhone SE and iPad Pro 9.7", while releasing new OS updates - iOS 9.3, watchOS 2.2, tvOS 9.2, and OS X El Capitan 10.11.4. While I have updated iOS and watchOS as soon as possible, including the betas, I had been holding my Mac mini and Macbook Air from getting El Capitan (OS X 10.11) updates, and instead kept using Yosemite (10.10). This was mainly to have the server running stable.

But now I felt that any early kinks in El Capitan had been fixed and it was getting increasingly inconvenient to have the previous version of OS X holding back some new features I could enjoy on my iOS devices. So I decided to take the plunge today. After about an hour of installation and fixing any broken server configurations that the new OS installed had caused, everything is running alright again.

When I started "The Toon-Box", I thought that I would eventually hit 4 digits in the number of strips, so it started as #0001. Ten years later, it really happened - today, it hit #1000. Wow.

Moving to the new home in Naju will be completed on November 25, 2014, and that includes moving the server equipment as well. As such, the website will be offline on that day, but I will try to minimize the downtime if possible. I hope the internet connection will be good.

Number of visitors coming from search engines indicate how much information of current interest exist on the website.

Looking back about three years, the search visitors peaked around the end of 2011 and went into a steady decline. Excluding the long-running web comic "The Toon-Box", the site had a new blog post every few months since the current framework went up in 2005 until a product review was posted in August 2011 and stopped altogether. It seems that, with the lack of any new stuff, the visitors naturally dwindled.

By the way, "The Toon-Box" series went into hiatus in July 2009 before returning in December 2013, but it didn't have any tags or indexes, so it was largely invisible to the search engines. To fix this problem, tags were introduced upon its return. I'm planning to add tags to the old comics as time allows.

But the truly interesting thing was the 2-month server downtime between February and March of 2013 caused by the iMac failure. Because the site went away for so long, the search engines probably de-indexed the pages, leading to a significantly reduced number of search visitors for several months following the restoration.

The visitor numbers would once again pick up in November 2013. This was shortly after I posted several pages of detailed review on iPhone 5S a month before. Now the daily number of search visitors is back to the old level again. I guess the search engines finally realized that the site is back in business.

The website went through a bit of overhaul. I've implemented a working tagging plug-in, so that the posts can now be organized by tags. The tag cloud on the lower right side of the website shows popular ones. Currently, posts from 2012 onwards are tagged, a total of 167 out of 1382 (12.1%).

Also, some Twitter plug-ins were put in, as well. The sidebar features a simplified Twitter feed from my @namuori timeline, while each blog posts now feature a "Tweet This" button that you can click to... tweet the article on your twitter timeline.