Adventurasia Community

Hello,

Thank you for visiting the Adventurasia.com blog!

I’ve been running the site during my spare time since 2001.

I originally setup the site as a means of experimenting with web technologies as well as sharing my photos and experiences with my friends and family back home. At the time, I also had envisioned that a community would develop and that the content would be automatically self-generating. The last part didn’t work as I had hoped, but the site has been an interesting experience nevertheless.

When I first created the site, I used a program called PHP-NUKE. It was my first experience with a CMS system and I thought it was quite good, that is, until the site started getting hacked on a regular basis.

During the second incarnation, I did some searching, and came across a program called Typo3 which seemed like a good system. Unfortunately, the learning curve was a bit steep and I didn’t really have time to experiment with the system. So, I decided to build the site using conventional static HTML pages, with the idea that I would eventually move to a content management system. The site more or less stayed the same for about 3-4 years as I was just too busy to make any big updates, other than to upload new photos. A couple of years ago, I started having problems with my hosting company, OLM. Problems included: not enough bandwidth due to people linking to my videos/images; space problems (basically my catch-all email box was collecting lots of spam, and I wasn’t aware of this) resulting in database and other corruption errors. Unfortunately, as I was too busy, and didn’t have time to set up the site on another server, I simply paid them the yearly hosting fees and kept the site as is.

Finally, I got a bit tired of it, and in December 2006, bit the bullet and decided to change server hosting companies. I’m now using PAIR Networks which seems to be quite good.

Along with the server hosting company change, I decided it would be a good opportunity to rebuild the site completely with a new design. At the time, I was thinking of using Typo3 as well as Plone, but once again the learning curve seemed too much given the circumstances.

Recently through my work, I’ve been involved in the development of a Social Network / Blog system, and through that, I’ve become somewhat acquainted with WordPress. So, yesterday (Feb. 11, 2007), I installed WordPress and proceeded to load in all the previous articles into the system. Many of these articles are rather dated, but I hope to be able to add new content from this point forward.