Sunrise recorded higher number of hits than usual on 28 and 29 February 2008, in particular my posts on some election campaign issues have brought in traffic to the site. Sunrise is not a political blog anyway, rather, this blog is meant to be a combo of a personal diary and current issues close to my heart and that of public interest, be it political, economical or social issues.

So it looks, political topics may rule Sunrise for the next one week, until the election results are out and that a new Cabinet line-up is announced. Election topics in Sunrise will not explicitly claim support to any candidate or party, but rather provide an analysis of issues in my opinion are important to ponder by all parties, be they the BN or Opposition. After all, we need a strong government to rule but we also need a strong opposition to provide check and balance.

Alright, for those who have frequently visit Sunrise (formerly known as The J Blog), you would probably notice that the link to Yummy!, the food blog that I planned to launch some time ago has been removed as I have aborted the plan for now. I will continue to maintain my personal website, James Ooi Online (http://www.jolmy.com/) and this blog, Sunrise (http://sunrise.jolmy.com/).

James Ooi Online was once a rojak website. It used to contain my personal profile, photo gallery, links to other sites, jokes, Nokia ringtone codes, MIDI files, a guestbook, etc. However, I decided to only keep the photo gallery and guestbook a few years ago, with my personal profile integrated as the home page. In 2007, I removed the guestbook and introduced a video gallery, YouTube-style, I mean using the FLV format.

It seems no new sections will be introduced anymore in the near future. However, the photo gallery, J Gallery will now feature albums of random snapshots taken from time to time instead beginning with Snapshots on 29 Feb 2008. The theme-based albums will continue to be added along the random snapshots albums.

Sunday 11 November 2007

TODAY marks the 10th Anniversary of JOLmy. Established 10 years ago, on 11 November 1997, it began as an experimental personal website which is continuously refined and updated.

My personal website currently contains a brief personal profile, online photo albums, video gallery and a web-based messaging interface. Meanwhile, I started blogging in October 2005, stopped a while in March 2006 but relaunched the current blog in July 2006.

On another matter, well, today seems to be an auspicious day. Heard that many people are getting married today. And well, the countdown to Chinese New Year stands at 88 days today! Well, what a coincidence!

A couple of days ago, I have reviewed the changes of logos for JOLmy over the last 10 years. This time, I will review the services that JOLmy is hosted from the time my website first started.

The first host was GeoCities (now known as Yahoo! GeoCities). It was the only free web hosting service I knew then. Then, GeoCities web pages are grouped into cities and suburbs. And James Ooi’s Home Page was located at Horizon suburb of the SiliconValley city at house number 5420, therefore giving the URL http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/5420 (well, clicking this URL will open a page with a page not found message). GeoCities have since use member login name as a directory to the domain for member pages URL.

For half a year, I stayed on with GeoCities, but on 13 May 1998, I visited a home page of my friend who is studying in Australia, she had a home page hosted at XOOM.com (now defunct). XOOM.com gave unlimited space, unlike GeoCities only provided 2MB then. Besides, XOOM.com did not force any ad banner/popups on member pages then, other than a requirement to put a link back to XOOM.com. Hence, the following day, I shifted my entire site to XOOM.com on the URL http://members.xoom.com/jamesooi/ (the xoom.com domain has been bought by another company).

Strange things started to happen some time in January 1999 and again in February 1999. My site started to appear within a blank frame automatically inserted by XOOM.com. I suspected that forced advertising would be implemented. True! At the end of February, they announced the implementation of XOOMbar, a frame for advertising will be implemented on all member pages! I shifted my site to Tripod at the URL http://jolnet.tripod.com/ on 10 March 1999, 3 days before XOOMbar was implemented. The URL was later changed to http://jolmy.tripod.com/ when I decided to use JOLmy instead of JOLnet as the name of my site. Tripod only forced a single popup window, which is still acceptable.

However, by middle of 2001, besides the standard popup window forced on Tripod member pages, Tripod started to force additional bigger popup windows and that is unacceptable. On 30 August 2001, I decided to subscribe to a paid hosting service based in the United States. The following day, JOLmy was moved to the paid hosting at the URL http://www.jolmy.com/ where it remains till today.

The former Guestbook

A guestbook for visitors to leave comments was introduced on 21 November 1997. It was then hosted by Lpage (later known as Guestworld, and now known as Tripod’s HTMLGear Guestbook). On 19 November 2000, I developed my own CGI-based guestbook script and had it hosted on VirtualAve free hosting before I finally shifted it to my paid hosting service on 3 September 2001. The guestbook was later rewritten in PHP where it remained till I decided to remove the guestbook a few months ago.

11 November 2007 marks the 10th anniversary of JOLmy. Beginning today, the JOLmy 10th Anniversary logo will be displayed in James Ooi Online and The J Blog until 29 February 2008.

The J Blog will highlight some interesting facts about JOLmy from now till 29 February 2008.

A new feature, Mail Me is now included in James Ooi Online.

This feature allows any visitor to contact me via email without having to reveal my email address. Visitors only need to enter his name, email address, message subject and his message before keying in a verification code to send the message.