This site had came a long way since I've started creating webpages as a hobby. This area talks mainly anything about well, the site that is- how it came about and how it is today.

Early stages

It was around 1994 when I remembered back when the internet in Singapore was accessible only through line-hogging and dialtone-killing 14kbps modems. Television stations closes at midnight and Google didn't existed back then. I was about 10 then where my family dial-up access was upgraded from Singapore Telecom Teleview. That's where I went: "hey I could have my own place on the web!" I got this small free neat space for hosting webpages and started there, then with Geocities and Lycos. Everything was largely done through raw code, experimentation and trial & error. I taught myself HTML, Photoshop and Marcomedia Flash (now Adobe Flash) in Secondary school, picking them out of interest and started experimenting different styles and formats to create decent site.

Not a homepage anymore

I was quite an avid PC gamer back then as a kid, so computer games was the talk of the town and the coolest things to talk about, so the site took a direction as an independent gaming website featuring reviews, in-depth hints, walkthroughs for the games I so adore back then. I was hosted with HTGK (Singnet) and PAGN (Pacific.net) which saw the site through the late 90s. It was not long after where they both got disbanded.

The birth of the Blog

The gaming site was not the direction and sustainable area to go, so I started converting the site back with a more personal direction, focusing on what I call "news and log" which more of less became an online diary or sort. It was not until around 2001 where Blogspot and Livejournal came about, where the word "blog" was invented. It offered a user friendly interface and convenient interface to post updates instantly.

A place to call my own

In 2003, shaunchng.com moved to its own domain and blogging system under a shared hosting environment, that was the first time the site required a significant budget to maintain its online presence. Despite this, the site still maintains a strict "no ads policy" mainly as I do not like to be bogged down by ads, neither would I want my visitors either. The site outgrew its shared hosting environment and presently, shaunchng.com resides on its own dedicated server built and maintained by myself. The server also doubles as a web development server and script testing as well.

Here are some national awards the site has bagged to date:

It's essentially a rack of Dell Poweredge Quad-core servers I have running on Redhat Linux and Windows Server 2008 together with my secret security cocktail blend. The servers serve various purposes at my disposal when needed split to production and experimental, supplementing my computing need at demand. Generally the production ones are the ones I use to run live services such as web applications, hosting this website, blackberry enterprise as well as my email server running on Exim, (an open source mail transfer agent developed by my University).

My developmental servers are used to test new platforms, scripts I've written, form a test bed for personal projects or when extensive computing or processing capabilities are required. The developmental servers also run my personal “smart-teachable” home assistant, JARVIS.

Other functionalities I use for the servers include online storage which also serves as a "big thumb drive" whenever I need to access my schoolwork in campus or anywhere globally without any physical flash media. Sometimes I also use them as dedicated gaming servers for Counter-Strike or Team Fortress 2.

The basic setup specifications are as follows:

Aha, computers, the unsung heroes we use for tools of the trade. Let's call this section my hardware appreciation page and the computers I use to make this site and my works possible. Moreover, I created this section in response to the questions I receive on the workstation setups I use to create the site and multimedia content in my portfolio. I will just list them down here. It's old & not exactly fast, but manages my needs very well over various platforms. Pictured here on the right is my desktop in the 3 screen setup.