Archive for March, 2008
We had to use a week old backup of the forums to do it, but the Korean language encoding is now resolved on the forums, and we’re back to normal. Just have to endure the lost of a week’s posts. I hope that we can now put the commotion past us and that we can now look forward to no more server transfers and related hiccups, for at least another 1-2 years, if not longer. It’s an economical, yet efficient setup now and I see no reason to move out of it, until our traffic deems that we’ve outgrown our bandwidth needs. Which I don’t see happening for a long while, unless, we or part of our sites begin to work in conjuction with a Korean media company and re-shaped to also cater to the Korean market. Which I also don’t see happening in the near term. At least until maybe 1-2 years after Project X is launched, which likely won’t see the light of day until next year, given my planned hiatus to Canada for the bulk of this year.
It’s about 4 years old, but might be useful for helping me find the ‘oldies but goodies’.
The most popular little Chinese restaurant in Sinchon is tucked in a quieter part in between the hustle bustle nightlife of Edae and Sinchon districts. But it receives a cult following from Koreans, nevertheless, and has been on food and restaurant TV programs, no less than 13 times in the past 5 years. Named after the popular north Hong Kong neighborhood, Wan Chai is a must visit for any Sinchonite or Seoulite hungry for great Chinese.
Photo from kaiiskai’s blog
Photo from Fluorescence’s blog
Photo from Violeto4’s blog
Been sidetracked due to trying to tame the forums, which had some signs of hangover after the migration to the new server last weekend. Almost have it stable. Will resume blogging and wiki work shortly.
Daegu has emerged to be the most trafficked page for us, other than the mainpage. We actually have a shitty ranking on Google for the keyword ‘Daegu’. I see that we are ranked #24, based on most Google Datacenters. But we do well in our long tail keywords, which are naturally more easier to move up in rank. If there is any reason not to fret too much is that ‘Daegu’ on its own, doesn’t get searched all that often. Last time that I checked Wordtracker, the keyword was only being searched 17 times a day. And depending on how you interpret site stats, we seem to be doing alright without top ranking on the cities main ‘keyword’.
Now, I don’t want to bore with explaining the pros and cons of this tracking tool vs the next. But no tracking tool shows the same results. And some are widely differently from each other. It’s like if you have 5 people watching a mystery drama that ends in a cliffhanger, each one will have different takes on whats going on and what info is left for the imagination to decide. Well, site tracking tools are not that scattered, but pretty close.
Tag-based tools like Google Analytics allow you to add html tags to all of your pages. This helps them provide detailed traffic analysis and how users navigate around. But its not without its drawbacks. Google Analytics (GA) code on the pages requires users to have Javascript installed, in order to be tracked by it. If you don’t have it, you won’t be counted. But the number of people who don’t have Javascript installed these days is not much. And then there are those who prefer to surf with Javascript disabled. And there there are other hitches that add up. If the user visiting your site is using a browser that doesn’t have cookies enabled, GA will still technically work, but the stats will be less accurate. Awstats and Webalizer are log-based and track EVERYTHING that hits your page, although Awstats filters out bots and spiders. Webalizer makes note of the referrer URL where you can see the footprints of the spiders, but you’ll have to manually subtract from the totals.
I haven’t tried Webtrends yet, which appears to use both tag-based and log-based means to measure your traffic. But the free stuff (Google Analytics, Awstats, and Webalizer) all need to be used in conjunction to get a ballpark verdict. The truth is usually somewhere in the middle of GA and Awstats. But as GA stat are more prettier to export, here’s a screenshot of the traffic that ends up on our Daegu page.
The green line shows where are traffic was last year and the blue one is traffic at this time. So we seem to averaging around 50 unique pageviews a day on the Daegu page (Webalizer minus spiders/bots says that we get 200+ pageviews to the Daegu page). So the 17 that we are not scooping from a high rank on ‘Daegu’ for Google searches doesn’t seem too terrible. This also doesn’t reflect our long tail keyword stats for Daegu pages that are off of the main one, such as Daegu nightlife (#3 on Google) and Restaurants in Daegu (#1 on Google), despite them not getting daily searches, but moreso weekly and monthly searches.
The Daegu wiki surely needs to be optimized more for SEO. But its nice to begin to see word-of-mouth disemminate, as I’ve met people offline in the city, who use it. And we had a some recent wiki edits and page additions from people in Daegu, as well, which is nice, as I’m in Seoul now and am out of touch with life down there.
I’ve noticed that the hair at the crown of my head is now getting sparse, despite thinking that the male pattern baldness gene passed me by, given my 35 years of a full head of hair. If it is not coming about genetically, then the past 3 years of server headaches may have been playing some role.
If I recall, our sites have been in as many as 7 different server environments since we started. We have a very finicky family of sites, where there always has to be at least one site that must bitch and complain in the form of irreconcilable DB or encoding issues. Well, nothing is every irreconcilable, if you have unlimited funds to press on and bring 2nd opinion and 3rd opinions in, and sooner or later after bring 10 people in to analyze the problem, someone is able to find the right recipe. We only have the luxury (which is still far better than most sites that have tricky setups) of having the in-house support team who governs the servers, plus we have a 3rd party server management firm who does work on a flat-rate monthly basis. If those 2 layers of support can’t find a way to resolve an issue, then the whole thing goes out the window and we re-approach.
The current issue is that we have recently moved from our dedicated server to a cheaper VPS (virtual private server). It’s a cost-savings move, given that I’m moving to Canada soon and a to-be-determined job situation to help pay down some site debts and maintain monthly costs. The VPS works well with all sites under our umbrella, except for the forums. The Korean language encoding was not working there and the 2 layers of support, plus my regular developer couldn’t solve the riddle. So the re-approach was to send the forums (along with theholygrillkorea, which also had an unrelated DB issue after moving to the VPS) to a cheaper, shared server run by the host who originally was managing the dedicated server. I figure that as their server environment and server specs are identical between their dedi and shared servers, that the encoding issue will most likely to resolve there.
So we just moved the forums and theholygrill to the shared server this weekend and I changed the DNS to point the subdomain to the new server. It’s not resolving correctly, as we are seeing a temp page, but the host is looking into it. Once the DNS is resolving correctly, we’ll be able to see the forums in their new home and see if the encoding is working correctly. Fingers crossed, as this is a difference of having to pay $270/mnth to have everything working fine on the original dedi server, to having the family of sites operating on the VPS and the shared server, for a total of $70/mnth (which includes the cost of both layers of support).
Edit: The forums and Korean encoding are working fine now on the shared server, so that’s stable. One hitch (of course) is the calendar of theholygrill site is crapping out and will cost about $110 in manhours to fix. Both developer and server admins are unable to stabilize it, even though it worked fine on the dedicated server. I’ll see if we can try another migration of those files to resolve the issue. But the dedicated server is going to be closing down next week, regardless.
A user on the wiki recently commented on our online profile of Little Italya and offers his feedback:
Best Italian food I have had in years and who thought I’d find it in Korea! The food is fresh and the staff is friendly. Tonight in fact the Chef greeted us at the door and waited on us! A great intimate little gem in the heart of downtown Daegu!
Myself, I actually haven’t been in there to eat, other than to stop by to pick up their business card and take the exterior shot that’s on the wiki page. But based on Korean bloggers in Daegu, the buzz on the place is equally as good as the user who commented on the wiki. Here are some photos taken from the reviews on the Korean blogs:
From Violet Street
From Fireman98
From hongrosaria
I’ve pulled just about every Sinchon restaurant that features world cuisine, fast food, etc…(basically everything non-Korean and non-Koreanized Japanese and Chinese, as all of that can be found everywhere), that I can find from Korean sites. Total of 66, at this point.
I now need to hit the streets to draw out more. Will likely be starting this next week.
Found a useful, but abandoned Korean blog with maps and restaurant mentions. The content is over 2 years old and most mentions are about places known for their Korean fare, whereas we try to focus on world cuisine. But if the restaurants are still there, they’ll be worth adding.
