Blogs

I just got Donnie Yen's latest in the mail about a week ago, so I reviewed it on MWB:

"Peter Chan’s “Wu Xia” is Donnie Yen’s best film since “Ip Man.” It might not be the fight-fest that fans expect from Yen, but it’s a visually striking film that engrosses with its unique take on the martial arts genre and entertains with Yen’s wuxia-style choreography."

I'm a Donnie Yen fan, so I may be a bit biased.

Last week, Google launched another Panda update. After I kinda fully recovered from the previous update, this one brough me back down again. I lost about 50% of my Google traffic. After each update, I'll change a few things around to make it a site that Google would like. And I usually recover. The only thing is I wonder if I would have recovered anyway if I didn't do anything, especially since each update always bring me back down.

I spent the whole day dealing with servers. The facility where Wopular and MoviesWithButter are hosted were having some network issues. I was able to get MWB up and running within an hour or so. Wopular was a whole different story. The Database is about 21GB. It's a huge db, so whenever there's a network issue, I can always count on at least one corrupt table. And it always happens to be the largest table, which takes several hours to diagnose and repair.

Long time no blog. Even I wasn’t expecting this long of a hiatus, but maintaining two sites does take a lot of time. I’ve made some minor tweaks to Wopular, but most of my work lately has been focused on MoviesWithButter.com. Here’s what Binh and I have done to promote the site since launching it a couple months ago.

I just launched a new movie site with my Rotten Tomatoes buddy Binh Ngo. It’s called MoviesWithButter.com, a website that tracks upcoming movies through various stages of development by aggregating scoops from the top movie sites on the web.

About a year ago, I decided to add an autorefresh to pages that contain feeds so that content would always stay fresh. I set it to autofresh every 3 minutes. I could have been done this via ajax, but my ajax kung fu wasn’t good enough then (or now). I went with the easiest method, which is a simple meta tag addition to those pages. I got the idea from Drudge Report.

It was fine for about a year until the week of the Panda Update 2.2, when all pages with the autorefresh would give the Googlebot errors and not get indexed.

Google have been tweating their search algorithms this year to battle content farms and scrapers. They named this tweak Panda Update. In February of this year, they released the first version, which was aimed at lowering the rankings of content farms - i.e. eHow, ezinearticles.com, and wisegeek.com. I don’t consider my site a content farm, but I did saw a 40% decrease in traffic as soon as the new algorithm went live.

It’s been a while since I last blogged; I’ve been busy working on a new site. Anyway, I’m back … with another slight adjustment to the newsrack on the right sidebar of the homepage. I moved Huffington Post and Fox News to the bottom, but above Digg.

I knew Yahoo Buzz was one of the “sunset” sites - properties that would be shutdown by Yahoo. I still kept it on the site, but moved it to the bottom of the homepage. The quality of the articles being voted up have been on the low-end months before its eventual demise was announced; sometimes, you even get spam. The site had also been redesigned to its bare essentials.

Working at Rotten Tomatoes kinda messed up my general view of advertising trends. The movie season peaks during Summer, takes a nosedive during Fall, heads back up during the Winter arounds Oscars, and levels off again during Spring. It’s a bit different from what I’ve experienced so far with Wopular, which is probably more in tune with the average website.