Web portfolio
I typed my first line of code back in 2000. This was the year when the Internet was exploding. The first website I coded was a fan page about martial arts actor Jet Li, which no longer exists. This is because Geocities, a defunct free web hosting service, stopped being available in North America.
The Cultural Post
This was a daily news blog I kept updated from 2008 to 2011. Besides offering movie reviews, the website contained news articles about what is going on in the Canadian film and television industry. Here are some of my achievements:
- Partnership with IMDB.com: Whenever an article mentioning a given film, TV show, actor, director and so on was published, IMDB.com scanned it and included it in the newsfeed of the appropriate page. For instance, the IMDB page of CTV's original series Flashpoint lists over ten articles of The Cultural Post in its newsfeed. My IMDB.com page is here.
- First news site in the world which broke the news about the renewal of CBC's Being Erica for a third season before any official announcement.
- Interviews with established and rising celebrities such as Erin Karpluk, the leading actress of Being Erica.
- Statistics: 30,000 unique visitors per month. The bulk of those visitors hailed from the United States, the United Kingdom and France. Besides, my blog was also read by Canadian actors, directors and producers.
- I replaced Blogger/Google's native comment system with that of Disqus, a blog comment hosting service. These are the reasons that led to this decision: Blogger's native system does not have a "reply" button that nests one comment under another and a spam controller. Moreover, one can choose to comment a post with his/her Facebook, Twitter, Disqus or Google account. If one comments as a guest, he/she must enter an email address. As soon as that was implemented, the number of anonymous comments plummeted.