The moment I post this is special. It’s exactly the halfway point of my month-long trip around Japan and India (with a few hours in Korea thrown in). This trip has been eye-opening and life-changing, just like any good trip should be. It has given me a chance to look at my life as a third person; I have begun revisiting my habits and assumptions as deep to the core as possible. As part of this process, I am pondering the future of this blog.

First of all, this blog won’t go away. In addition to being a journal, it has made me a better writer and photographer and has served as my sandbox. I just need some time away from it to think. I have been writing a little under 3 posts per month for the last 7 years and 2 months. I think it is time for a break.

I’ll be back soon. Maybe in a few weeks or a few months.

18.7% [updated] Beware: Uber Has No Customer Service and Still Has Bugs

The most popular post on my blog is my complaint about Uber. Back in Fall 2013, I was overcharged quite a bit after an Uber ride and had a hard time getting a refund. I resorted to writing a scathing post about Uber and posted it on Hackernews. The post stayed on the front page for a night and my customer service issue was quickly resolved.

10.9% Omegle Bot Hilarity

One tenth of all traffic to my blog was generated by this post from 2010. I let a robot speak with strangers on Omegle, an anonymous chat website similar to Chatroulette. Surprisingly, one girl from Scotland had an hour long conversation with the bot without realizing that she was chatting with my computer. I put it up on Reddit and it stayed on the front page for a day.

Here is short excerpt from the chat conversation:

You: Do you want to hear a joke?
Stranger: why not
You: Ambiguous: Sure or Because that is what told me to say.
Stranger: thats not a very good joke

There are quite a few hilarious dialogues and nuggets in the transcript. I had to hold myself back from reprinting them all here.

4.9% Why Is It so Hard to Exit Skype?

If you know me, you know that I don’t like it when services and products that I pay for have poor usability or customer service. When I’m paying, I expect a great user experience. Skype didn’t make it easy for me to shutdown their application on Windows. Naturally, I complained. Somehow, this post has brought in nearly 5% of traffic.

1.9% 40 Year Old Lens On My DSLR

This post is from college when I was getting interested in putting older manual focus lenses on modern cameras. I bought a fisheye lens from from the late 1960s and mounted it on my 30D via an adapter. I posted about how I found the lens and a few technical details about mounting M42 lenses on EOS DSLRs.

Since then, I have sold the lens and mounting old lenses on new cameras has become commonplace. In fact, my only digital camera right now is a modern mirrorless camera with a manual focus lens mounted on it.

1.8% New Camera: Canon Canonet 28

This one is yet another post about camera gear. I bought an old Canon rangefinder film camera at a thrift store in New York and wrote about rangefinders. I even included a video shot through the viewfinder of the camera that shows how rangefinders operate. A lot of people land on this page after searching for information about the Canonet series of cameras.

1.8% Week in NY 10/4-10/10/2010

This was one of quite a few weekly posts that I was doing in my senior year of college. I wrote about my watches (which I still wear daily almost 5 years later), an information session at Microsoft, my first hackathon, and a few other school activities.

1.6% E-Waste Hunting

This is one of my favorite posts from my junior year in college. Caroline and I used to regularly visit a “computer graveyard” deep in the bowels of Columbia. We would remove and take home small components like CPUs and RAM from the computers that were being discarded. I amassed a sizable collection of CPUs spanning a few decades, an almost complete history of Intel chips. In this post, I wrote a bunch of geeky details about some of the stuff we found.

1.3% Movies I discovered this summer

This post is a very short review of three movies I watched in the summer after my sophomore year of college. Coincidentally, all three were foreign films. One is French, another Chinese and the last is Korean.

1.1% Headphone Mod

The first high end headphones that I ever purchased are the Audio Technica ATH-ES7 . I bought them much before Beats by Dre and other high end headphones became mainstream like they are now. I loved them, but they had one problem. The cords kept tearing or getting frayed. I sent them in once for warranty repair, but they tore again. I was fed up. I took matters into my own hands and replaced the original cord with the cord from a pair of Apple earbuds.

1.0% Week in NY 10/25-10/31/2010

This is yet another weekly post from senior year. It covers halloween, our halloween potluck, shopping for and assembling costumes, dressing up in our costumes and attending the Village Halloween Parade. I think this post gets a lot of traffic because of my Nerd Herd costume from the show “Chuck”.

0.9% Wonder Girls!

As you may know, I used to be a huge K-pop fan from the end of high school to the end of college. One year, Caroline surprised me with tickets to the Wonder Girls JYP concert. This concert still is one of my favorite concert experiences. Rereading this post brought back so many memories. It also makes me sad that the Wonder Girls ended the way they did. They had so much potential.

0.8% I’m a Burner: My Experience at Burning Man 2013

This last post is by far my favorite. It might not be my best writing or photography, but it took the most thought and effort to produce. Burning Man continues to be one of the most transformative experiences in my life. I find that the things I learned there have seeped into every part of my life. I’m a burner and always will be.

For the first two years, this blog was in a constant state of flux. I frequently changed blog themes, post formats, and writing styles. It was a phase of experimentation lacking any true vision or goals. As time went on though, my ideals started to crystallize. Through analytics and feedback from friends I started to understand the type of content that my loved ones truly appreciate.

I was also shaped by other blogs and publications. I adapted the photo-rich life blogging style from Danny Choo, the discreetly placed links within posts from LA PINK ONE, historical explanations from Randomwire and borderless photo tiling from VSCO’s journal.

I became more deliberate with the way I crafted posts. The whole process started taking longer, but I was having more fun, and most importantly the results were much better. Sometime last year, I realized that the design of the blog lacked this focus that the content has. I myself didn’t fully understand the rationale behind many design decisions. That’s a bad state to be in.

Before and After

About six months ago, I changed everything. The redesign went live, but I never announced it. There were so many loose ends to tie up that I wanted to wait for perfection before officially talking about the redesign. Well, it has been months and I’ve realized that this blog will never be perfect. There will always be things for me to change and improve (I already have a long list on my desk). That’s why this post now exists. Look at the side-by-side comparison below of the earlier look to the left and the newer look to the right.

Rationale

Just like any design or engineering exercise, the answers, the results and the decisions aren’t what is important. Rationale is. It’s the philosophy and intent behind these answers, results and decisions that is important. So, as I list out the many changes I made, focus on the rationale behind them.

1. Comments are gone: 99% of the comments I used to get on this blog were spam. I have a decent filter that catches them, but occasionally one would get through. I also found that most useful conversation about my posts happens on Facebook, Hackernews and Reddit. I couldn’t justify a comments system anymore. So, I cut it out.
2. Social media links are gone: I used to have share buttons and links to my social media accounts. They barely got any attention. So, I cut them out.
3. Color: I wanted my blog to have a clearer identity. Everything was some shade of grey. It didn’t communicate my taste or my vision. So, I decided to run with a theme I had been mulling over for ages. Black+Yellow.
4. Header menu: It wasn’t always clear how to get back to my blog from other pages. So, I added a “Blog” link to the menu. The RSS logo to the right didn’t communicate its purpose. I replaced it with a “Subscribe” link. The links were a combination of center and right justified, it didn’t make any sense. I left justified everything but the subscribe, which is prominently displayed to the right. This blog was originally going to be a portfolio in addition to a place for my thoughts and stories. It never happened. I cut out the projects section of the site.
5. Prominent buttons: The navigation and search buttons are more prominent since they were lost in the previous design.
6. New about page: My old about page was verbose and self-aggrandizing and didn’t really talk about the blog much. I put up a new picture of myself and rewrote the blurb.

Going Forward

This blog has been more than I could ever have imagined. It has helped me improve my writing, my photography, my storytelling and the way I think. I still have big plans for it.

First, I need fix the mobile and tablet experience. More and more of my readership is coming from mobile these days and the experience isn’t up to par.

After that, expect to see new storytelling methods and new mediums that I haven’t tried before. I want to better tell my life’s story to you and improve the way we connect through this blog.

When I first started this blog in 2008, I tried out a few different themes before settling on this one. That was in 2010. Back then, my monitor was 1440px wide, iPhone screens were 320px wide. A 500px wide blog was acceptable.

Now, my monitors are 1920px and 2560px wide while my iPhone is 640px wide. As my blog has changed to focus more on my photography, 500px just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

To fix that, I have widened the site to 800px. All new posts will be 800px wide while old posts will remain at 500px wide. The font in new posts is also slightly larger. Maybe in the future, I’ll make some more drastic changes to make it easier for me to tell stories and present my photos and video. Until then, I think this change will be great.

As always, feel free to give me any feedback or criticism you may have.

I’ll leave you with a photo from a weekend in San Francisco as a preview of how photos will look on my blog.

Also, there is an mobile version of the site! If you browse my site on an iPhone or Android phone, you should be taken to a special optimized version of my site!

Well, it worked for a while, but it had too many images and too much flash (any flash is too much flash). Which meant that it loaded pretty slowly. I spent the last week modifying the excellent Grid Focus theme to suit my taste and added some functionality. I’ll highlight some of the new features:

First, my posts are now categorized for easy finding. Just press the browse button and watch categories magically (actually with the help of jQuery) appear and push the rest of the page down. Go on try it out.

Second, I have implemented captcha to prevent spam bots from emailing me or commenting. The cool thing about reCAPTCHA, the captcha plugin I use, is that instead of just typing in a randomly generated phrase, you are actually helping scan books. Read about it here.

Third I have a calendar that uses AJAX. So, if you switch months, then only the calendar reloads, not the whole site. The center button has a drop down list of posts for the month.

Also, the front page now shows full posts and not summaries. I found that summaries are better suited to news blogs and other sites that post more often.

I hope you guys like the new look. If you have any suggestions or find any problems, then feel free to email me (you can use the contact form!). Thanks!