Note to Readers #7

A couple of weeks ago, we allowed our previous url's (www.suburbankid.tk) redirection to our site to lapse. I want to say that we will not be relinking the redirect and from now on only suburban-kid.com will lead to this site.

This is mainly because the redirection itself wasn't so much a normal, 'official' redirect that you can usually do on your domain registrar (Goddady, Namecheap etc). The 'free' nature of the .tk domain, which made it attractive to us - or rather, me, as the team hadn't been formed yet - in the past, also came with severe limitations, one of them being that it was almost impossible to make a redirect when we decided to get a .com domain.

Well, the keyword is 'almost'; through a lot of googling and a dose of ingenuity, we managed to pull it off by attaching an empty webhost to the domain, and using that webhost to force the redirect. If it sounds like I'm speaking in Greek here, you can ignore all of that and simply know that we succeeded. But it was, quite plainly, a hack, and it was hard to maintain - the webhost itself required constant updating by logging into its dashboard, or it would expire, cutting off the redirect. Which kept happening, only I renewed it every time before the last.

Then there's the fact that .tk domains are just bad for search engine optimisation (SEO), mainly due to the fact that a lot of scam sites use them. That was why before today, you'd never be able to find Suburban KID on a Google results page, whereas now we're close to the top. Cutting off all links to that domain will hopefully provide us with an even cleaner slate to work with.

We'll consider setting up a small page at our old domain to remind users who still haven't realised that we're on suburban-kid.com now (seriously?), but the fact that our readership has remained steady even after the expiry of the redirect seems to indicate that it isn't much of an issue. Just thought we should let everyone know what's going on anyway, lest you're curious about the 404 page you'll get visiting our old domain. Have a great weekend!

A Glimpse of Simplicity

#shortstories is an ongoing series of articles recounting some of our interesting real life experiences.

It happened on a rainy Saturday.

I was at my weekly job as a hostess in a restaurant, and as always, it was busy. It was pouring outside, and business was as busy as ever. An hour before closing, and the crowd was beginning to thin. A middle aged woman ran in, and handed me a leather bound journal, claiming that she found it outside in the rain.

I See You

#shortstories is an ongoing series of articles recounting some of our interesting real life experiences.

As with many things, spotting her was a pure coincidence. Or luck, depending on what you believe in. I lay back against my chair, partially relieved from completing a long, tedious chemistry worksheet. Massaging my neck a little, I leaned slightly to my right, momentarily enjoying the sweet joy of completion.

I saw her.

Note to Readers #6

Hi internet, it's your favourite online editor back again with a short update.

You may or may not have noticed a slight decline in Suburban KID posting activity lately. Regional readers will know that nearly our entire team is caught up in various national exams, also known as Very Serious Matters, a natural consequence of being in the final grade and all. Hence the decline in posting frequency.

That line sounded way too much like Physics-cum-Social Studies for my liking. Anyway.

We have yet to emerge from the dark pits of big equations and even bigger textbooks, but I personally am in a more, 'available', state than before. So while we won't be fully operational just yet, I can at least start warming those engines in preparation.

In preparation for S.K.'s fourth anniversary, that is.

Chalking up another year is always a huge excitement for us, and naturally we try to inject some life in commemoration of the event. As you might have seen last year, our third anniversary also saw the launch of v3.0 of the site, which was a complete revamp and relaunch, and the Calling Home series of articles. This year won't see such huge changes - contrary to many rumours, the SK team does sleep - but we will officially usher in v4.0. Actually, that's not quite accurate; v4.0 has actually resembled something of a 'rolling release', and we've been pushing out small updates and bug fixes over the past couple of months, which will accumulate to make version 4 (an example was the site optimisation we announced, which has managed to lower load times by up to 60%).

There are also be some special articles in the pipeline, including a new series that will be launched soon: #shortstories, a series of short (duh) articles of little experiences we have had that were interesting, funny or entertaining in some way to us.

All in all, there is quite a bit of stuff coming up, though we can't announce much yet - need some suspense in life, no? - that we hope you, the reader, will enjoy and love as much as we enjoy and love creating them. Watch this space.

Oh, before I forget: to our readers who celebrate it, happy premature Halloween!

Note to Readers #5: From the Editor

I don't think many people have noticed, but I haven't been posting much lately.

Our front page pretty much illustrates this clearly: with the exception of "Perks of Not Caring" and the previous "Note to Readers" - the latter being nothing more than a very brief update post - every other article was written by another person on the team.

In my opinion, that's not really a bad thing.

We've Moved. Again?

Welcome to suburban-kid.com.

Yes, you read that right: the Suburban KID team is proud to announce our arrival into a new home - www.suburban-kid.com. Yay! Since October 2011, our dot.tk domain has served us well, but we ultimately needed to 'move house'. So, you might ask, why the sudden change? Here is some insight as to why we did it.

Two years ago, we acquired the dot.tk domain name because it was, essentially, free. However, being FOC had its negative connotations. One of them being the fact that dot.tk still owns "www.suburbankid.tk", meaning that it can be swapped from us at any time. Obviously, we don't want that to happen, and I believe our lovely readers share our sentiments, so we decided to acquire a different domain name. Thankfully, the team has been able to chalk up our very own "www.suburban-kid.com", and in a short period of time*, I might say.

Another problem with the dot.tk domain was that it fared badly in search, particularly Google's. It was not search engine optimized (SEO). To put it simply, Google ignored us, and almost all dot.tk sites. Make a quick search for us ("Suburban KID") on Google, and you'll know what I mean; frankly, it was quite hard for us to get our content discovered by readers.

A look at our suburbankid.tk domain will show you that we still have not gotten automatic redirection to work, yet another con of using a free domain. We hope to resolve that issue in time, but for now we hope to ask all readers manually enter this URL to access the site.

This slightly abrupt change of homes, however, presented an opportunity for Suburban KID to grow up. In the past few months, the team has already grown in numbers, adding two writers and contributors - myself and Gregory. While we have had, regretfully, too little time to welcome to Greg properly, he now has his proper place on our "The Team" page, which you can check out (trust us, it's worth it...)

With big exams coming up for all of us, we unfortunately don't have much time to contribute to Suburban KID as we'd like. Rest assured, however, that we always have things in the pipeline, now more than ever, and we're excited about what's to come, which we hope will be equally exciting to all of you once we get to work on them properly. Watch this space.


*Editor's note: we actually acquired our domain name and activated the connection between Blogger's servers and our registrar within less than a day! The redirection from suburbankid.tk to our new location was, as you can see, a whole 'nother story, which resulted in the downtime.

Note to Readers #4

It's been quite a bit since I've done these announcement posts, eh? I like to keep them short and sweet, so here we go.

Good news: We have something exciting coming up.

Bad news: We can't reveal it just yet.

Ugly news: To implement this piece of "exciting news", we will unfortunately need to temporarily go offline, at least at sporadic times between tomorrow, until completion, which we expect to be 2100 hrs (GMT +8) Tuesday, August 13. This also has the side effect of you not being able to read this message, but for those 

Tl;dr: Suburban KID *may* go OFFLINE between 0600 hrs August 11, to 2100 hrs August 13. All times listed in GMT+8.

On Blogging

Here's a quick little post for those of you who are getting impatient for our next updates. (More specifically, one person - you know who you are.)

Of all the things I'm confident I can do (not many), writing is by far the oldest. I came into the blogging scene relatively late though (2009) and, frankly, it was a poor representation of what I could write. Dig up this site's old archives and you'll get what I mean. 

Actually, no, please don't. It's terribly embarrassing.

(More) About Me

Before I start anything, I want to say: you guys are awesome.

No, seriously.

Hopes and Dreams

Approximately half of me, I believe, is attached to Suburban KID.

As James Bond rightly puts it, “everyone needs a hobby”. But Suburban KID is more than a hobby. It’s a passion, a pouring of my time and energy for no immediate gain.

Perhaps, if I look at it in a pessimistic passion, it’s because I’m not really good at anything else. No, I’m serious; deep inside, I know I’m not a talented person. What I can do relatively well is within the realms of writing and speaking. In everything else, I am, at best, mediocre.

I admit to having a bit of an inferiority complex. But it isn’t easy, seeing how everyone around you so chock-full with skills and talent, and you feeling unworthy being even near them. And before anyone says this is related to being in Singapore, it isn’t: everyday on Facebook I am reminded of the many, many high-flying people I leave behind, with them winning competition after competition, and generally going places. I feel bad for not being up to them. And I feel bad for feeling that way.

If there’s any good to come out of that, it means that my dedication to Suburban KID is stronger than ever. Over the past few months, the team here has worked hard to give this site the design and feel it deserves. And if I may say so myself, I’m quite pleased with the outcome.

I’ll be the first to admit that it isn’t perfect; while we have done some extensive testing, you may or may not experience a few bugs or flaws here and there. However, it packs quite a few extra features, and (subjectively) looks more keeping with the times.

Here’s the changelog:

-Revamped UI, focusing on a simple light theme
-Changed blog header
-High(er) social media integration, through the use of social media icons and Facebook/Google+ followings
-New content slider to showcase latest posts
-New ‘Recommended for You’ slider when viewing posts
-New ‘Featured Posts’ widget
-Removed Blogger ‘Following’ widget (please use either the Facebook/Google+ widgets instead, as Blogger is discontinuing support of the aforementioned widget)
-Removed ‘Subscribe to Blog/Blog Posts’ widget (it became redundant)
-Removed ‘Contact Us’ page
-Information from ‘The Team’ widget moved to its own page
-Rewritten FAQ
-Changed or tweaked font types and sizes

And that isn’t all. We have a whole series of articles coming up titled ‘Calling Home’, featuring some unique work from both myself and a number of guest writers. Stay tuned for that. If all goes to plan, I’ll also slip in some extra features before the start of the 2013 school period.

The playground is open. Time to go play.

Writers

Saying writers love to write is like saying Lionel Messi is a good footballer.

Writers live to write. It’s like a drug, gnawing away constantly at their souls, making them jumpy and irritated when separated for too long. They have their own niches, but they’re usually happy enough to take on any topic or challenge you throw at them. As long as they get to write.

But one thing writers have in common is that they never write about this passion of theirs. This also means not writing about themselves - writers. Which is strange; this isn’t a topic that lacks meat or detail, and there’s certainly much to say about this weirdly fascinating group of people.

This is a short piece for writers, about writers.

Welcome to Suburban KID

For the entire length of its uptime, Suburban KID has always been a one-man operation.

I wrote my own posts. Did my own web developing. Explored and experimented the CSS-HTML-filled innards of the blog myself. Worked on my own photo editing. And, of course, took full credit when the work was finally done and published.

It's been a great time. I still remember the times when I would feel bored, whether at school or at home, and log into the familiar Blogger homepage to spend some time on this blog. Sometimes I would write, sometimes I would tweak the design. Other times I did nothing productive at all. It was a wholly different world; it was something that gave me a true sense of ownership, and as Suburban KID grew and matured, a sense of pride as well.

However, with growth and expansion comes new tasks and responsibilities. Readers expect more; the days where I would pen a nonsensical post about Miley Cyrus (don't ask) are long gone. Quality is a necessity, and that means more focused writing, better editing, better pictures, and the like.

It is with those reasons that I announce that the one-man operation ends today.

Another Big Number

Blackout

In less than 16 hours, Suburban KID will be joining Wikipedia, Reddit and others in a blackout to protest the censorship of the internet.

Details after the break.

UPDATE: The online and street protests against SOPA and PIPA have been a major success. Millions of people signed petitions, thousands of people took to the streets and thousands of websites blacked out. Even several of Congress's have crashed from a major influx of email and phone calls. Congratulations to the FREE and OPEN World Wide Web!

So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish (Christmas Special II)

If you don't understand the title, shame on you. Go look it up.

So much has been happening this month.

My blog has just celebrated it's 2nd birthday yesterday - although once again, I failed to do anything about it, Christmas is coming - yay! - and the year, this very interesting year, is ending.

Oh, yeah, and I'm leaving.

More Renovation and Moving

You might have noticed that the Starfighters tab/page at the top right of the page....is no more. Didn't notice? Well, I'm telling you. Look up. There.

Random Talk

The following is a conversation between me and a fellow friend and blogger, Amanda NYC on ASEAN, Malaysia and traditional costumes. Find her on her blog at Her Effervescence.

I recently(very!) had a considerably long chat with Amanda, also an ASEAN scholar (Junior College) heading to Singapore next year. It started out normal, but as the issues we turned to are rather relevant to many of you Malaysians out there(doesn't matter if you're not), I decided to compose it into a something...readable for both our blogs.

We've Moved!

You heard that right.

The Suburban KID committee is proud to announce that Suburban KID, which used to be terencewang101.blogspot.com, has now the domain name www.suburbankid.tk, acquired from dot.tk.

The Elephant In the Room

Someone told me that short posts sometimes worked better than long, dreary ones.



So.

Good.

Luck.

PMR-ians. (quote Grace Goh)

(Yes, I'm lazy.)

Not Trying Too Hard

Sometimes, it's best not to try TOO hard at something.

For the past few weeks(months?), I've been trying and trying to create a good-looking template for my blog. Now, that wouldn't have been hard at all, but the problem with me is that sometimes I insist too much on being...authentic.

This means that I automatically refused to "just" modify Blogger's given templates and do my own instead. Which was okay, until the background part.

It went downhill from there.