Personal Blog of Carl Pei

The USA has the most internet users in the World, estimated at 162-210 million. Just several years ago, the internet would collectively become slower when the American’s woke up and got online.

In recent years, internet connectivity has developed tremendously in China. In the June 2007 reports published by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC), it was estimates that China has 162 million internet users. Although, as a country, the percentage of those who know English is very small, Chinese internet users are mainly below 30 and of the new generation. These people are generally much better at English compared to their predecessors and love western culture and media (and websites ). China is also home to many tens of thousands of English speaking expats from the US, UK and Australia. This is definitely not a market to neglect.

On my site Meizu Me, around 3% of the users are from China. This might seem small and insignificant, but still accounted for more than 2,500 unique hits last month. I can’t afford to lose that amount of traffic - can you?

Problem With The Chinese Internet Market

In China, the internet is censored. Websites (and sometimes even entire IP ranges) with information against the government is blocked. This is done automatically by a spider crawling for certain censored keywords. If found on a page, it will be blocked.

You don’t have to make your site in Chinese, just make sure it’s accessible from China. To check if your site works, there are 3 ways:

1. Use a Chinese proxy through your browser. You can find one here.
2. There is a website that claims to check for you, but I have found it to be very inaccurate. Prior to coming to China, it showed that many of my sites were blocked. But after I arrived, I realized that they all work.
3. The third option is to let me check for you. Post your URLs in the comment and I’ll check to see if they work here.

If your site is blocked, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your domain is. Many server IPs on shared hosts are blocked, because neighboring sites may have anti-CCP (Chinese Communist Party) information. To fix this, you can ask your host to move you to a different server, or ask them to assign you a unique IP (this usually costs around $35 USD).

If your domain is blocked, there is not much you can do. It is much like being blacklisted by Google. You can remove the infringing content, wait and hope to get unblocked. Unblocking happens, witnessed by the recent unblocking of Wikipedia.

Back in 2003 I was great at web design, the Photoshop tricks I could do back then were still considered cool and the way I coded layouts were considered modern. However, somewhere along the line I lost my way between periods of inactivity. Web 2.0 was a pretty distant concept and I avoided using CSS for layout like the plague. As the Web 2.0 concept developed further, I got left behind and gave up.

It came to a point when I stopped creating own layouts and websites and instead only used free templates on pre-made CMS systems and it wasn’t until recently that I begun to regain my confidence in web design.

Getting Back Into Design

I have long been a fan of the Coupon Source logo, and always wondered how it was done. It looked so good and it’s not so easy to see how it was done. I think I might have admired it for a year, until one day last week I finally decided to learn how it was made. So I looked at it, analyzed it and after a while it finally snapped. I thought of a way that something like that could be made. Below is how mine turned out.

I’m very proud of it, but the technique doesn’t work as well for this font, if anyone could tell me what font Coupon Source uses for the header or at least suggest a similar one I would be grateful!

Winning a Graphic Design Contest

After creating the awesome graphic, I decided, with my newly gained confidence, to enter a design contest on Digital Point. Low and behold, I get a PM after two days saying that I have won, an unexpected but welcomed $25 found its way into my PayPal account. I recommend you to participate in the DP contest forum to practice your graphics skills. Who knows, if you get lucky you might even receive some money for it.

I’m Going to Learn CSS

Winning the graphic design contest gave an additional boost to my confidence, after which I was motivated to finally learn how to code layouts in CSS and catch up with the rest. If you want to start learning CSS, I recommend CSS Basics. It’s great and easy to follow!

It’s time for me to clean up my domain portfolio, and I’m giving away three domains for free. If you want one, all you need to do is add a comment telling me what you are going to do with it. First come, first serve. One domain per person.

• blproxy.com (Expires 2008-04-12): A domain I bought recently as an impulse on Godaddy. I was going to create a proxy called Bruce Lee Proxy, I even did the layout, but then decided to move away from proxies. Free push to Godaddy account.
• the-gaia-project.com (Expires 2007-09-28): One of my first domains, the project was ditched. It’s on Wild West Domains, a Godaddy reseller. I have no idea how to push it for free, if you do, tell me. If not, you are responsible for the transfer cost.
• safelyhidden.com (Expires 2008-03-08): A proxy domain no longer in use. Also on Wild West domains.

Please take one only if you are going to use it. It’s not for parking or reselling.

Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for is upon us. Google is making a move and updating Page Rank. Currently, the new PR can be seen on a few data servers. To check, you can use the tool here. Below are some of my changes in PR.

• Carl Pei dot Com: PR0 - PR4 / This was more or less expected and achieved through reciprocal blogroll exchanges and promotion in forum signatures.
• Meizu Me: PR4 - PR5 / Google is finally showing me some recognition, but one of the competing sites has gone from PR5 - PR6 with this update.
• Meizu-MusicCard.info: PR0 - PR3 / Pretty unexpected, but all thanks to around 100 directory submissions and links in forum signatures.
• Meizu-MiniOne.info: PR0 - PR3 / Same as above.
• Site 01: PR1 - PR2 / I seriously don’t understand why this site performs so poorly, it’s a good site! I’ll consider selling this after a tune-up and a contest.
• Site 02: PR0 - PR3 / Great! This is the new site mentioned when I sold a few sites. I haven’t spent more than 2 hours promoting it and it receives thousands of unique hits daily. Oh, and I just remembered that I need to talk how promotion was done here.
• Site 03: PR0 - PR0 / Launched close to Site 02, but definitely less successful. Haven’t spent more than 20 minutes on promotion, but still slightly disappointed.

Now it’s time for me to evaluate what worked and what didn’t in acquiring PR, and hopefully learn to then get better Page Rank faster, in the future.

Most people would want to attach a moral negativity around the word revenge. But is it really wrong? They say that two wrongs don’t make a right, but does revenge have to be wrong?

This story goes back to the release of the second generation iPod (the first version compatible with PCs) in 2002. Back then, iPods were not common, but I was an early adopter - the second kid in school to own one. As it was my first MP3 player, I didn’t expect much and was overall pleased with it.

After a few months I began hearing that something was loose inside every time I shook it, and decided to send it back for repair. I packaged my iPod and earphones and sent them away. After approximately a month, I got it “fixed”, and by “fixed” I mean “looked at, but not fixed”. There was still something loose inside, and my white iPod earphones were gone! So I called support asking for my earphones, and they wanted my serial number. Fair enough, I gave it to them, but they couldn’t find it in their database. I explain that I’ve got a refurbished unit to them, give them the serial number of the refurb, and they still couldn’t help me. I get pissed off, hang up and swear that one day I’ll have revenge. (more…)