Welcome to the New Mad Scene

And so here begins a new chapter in the travails of this blog. Why the new URL you ask? I suppose this shift has been a long time coming due to many reasons. First and foremost is that I needed to find a way to cut down on maintenance work: the Wordpress Developer system that was running the original site has become too difficult to maintain. It is a huge daily effort to weed out the hundreds of spams that the previous site receives although some readers have been telling me that their comments get deleted upon posting. After screwing-up my original HTML work on the old template it has since become a mess and uninspired; also it appears differently on different computers for some reason. In addition it is not compatible with my Google Chrome browser and post layouts will go haywire when edited with it. With Blogger's more stable, user-friendly system and spam filters, hopefully these problems will become a thing of the past.

Another advantage of Blogger's that I wish to exploit is its ability to publish Chinese text, something that the old site will simply turn to question marks when published. Note though that this blog will still remain an English blog, just that the odd titles and names may come with their original Chinese characters. Its ridiculous that an ethnic Chinese currently living in a Chinese society can't even write Chinese characters on his own blog. At least with Blogger I will have more freedom to widen my range of writing.

So what will become of the old site? Well it will still be online so you (and search engine users) can still access your favourite articles. Still, it is with some apprehension that I decided to leave the old site, as it has contained so many classic articles from the past 3 years, and that it ranks so highly on Google. Nonetheless I believe that one must not be afraid of change when the need arises. And since we are moving addresses, why not get a new look as well? My special thanks to my good friend Justin for re-designing his original banner which has in turn inspired this new look.Do give him a ring if you need design work done. Meanwhile, here's to a brand new start for The Mad Scene, and to many more years of great reportage of opera and vocal concerts in Singapore and the region!