世論 What Japan Thinks

You may notice that I’ve added a Related Posts option that hopefully can point you towards related stories. The whole thing works automatically, so if you get diverted to a seemingly unrelated post, don’t blame me!

As I mentioned before, I’ve got the Performancing Metrics up and running, and finally my public stats are available. No laughing at the back please! Clicking the Performancing button at the bottom left achieves the same effect.

No April Fools from me this year, as I had a complete lack of inspiration! Did anyone find some interesting ones?

Just thought I’d point out that I’ve just started using Performancing Metrics to help me analyse what’s going on here a bit better. It looks interesting (and free!), and I will be leaving my stats publicly readable – the new Performancing button in the bottom left should take you to the same statistics page. I think that should work anyway!

UPDATE: The publicly-viewable portion of the Performancing Metrics in not currently in operation, as it is still being tested. There is a public RSS feed, but it’s probably not very interesting to look at!

I was very pleased to find this very web site had been selected by Japanzine as one of “The Best of Japan on the Web”. Thank you very much for that, and I hope some of the people finding me through that link decide to stick around.

Now the apology – I’ve been a bit ill the last few days, so I’ve been unable to update on my usual daily schedule. Hopefully I’m OK now and I can get back to regular updates. I’ve got a few interesting ones in the pipeline, as well as some that are not quite so interesting, but I hope have value to someone! This slight layoff couldn’t have been worse timed, I don’t think; in addition to the best of award above, I also got linked via some list of links a couple of days ago, but I’ve had no new material for all my new viewers. Bottoms.

Looking at my server logs, I see one of the search phrases I got a hit from on Valentine’s Day was “when wife does not love you”. Fair put a damper on my day, that did.

I’ve also decided that I’m not too proud to put out the begging bowl, so I’ve added a wee donations button from PayPal up in the top-right, should you ever have the urge to slip me a few quid; my favoured currency is UK pounds sterling, but of course I’ll accept anything! Anyone contributing will be doing so as a donation, expecting nothing in return (so don’t come complaining if you don’t get anything), but depending on how much you might decide to push my way and how I am feeling I will endeavour to return a small token or favour that may vary from just a @whatjapanthinks.com mail address to a trinket; perhaps just a used railway pass card (not the one pictured, however!) for small contributions to something like a mobile phone strap or other small souvenir item for larger givers. In addition, a back-link to any donors may also be added for some unspecified length of time, subject to arbitrary selection criteria such as no links to spam, splogs, pr0n or other categories of web page that I might not care to link to. I reserve the right to withhold any or all of the above offers, and even the right to return any money that I judge to have been offered in bad faith or outwith the accepted meaning of a donation.

Sorry for the rather harsh-sounding words at the end there, but I suppose I should cover all bases up front as spammers are rather resourceful these days. I’ve also added this text to my “About” page.

Oh, and a question to you the reader – has my web site been unreachable at times over this weekend? Traffic has dropped off quite a bit, and I’ve had problems logging onto the site myself.

Finally, I had an email from the author of MKT’s diary and life in Japan, asking for a link, so here we go. I’ve not had time to read his blog on Japan by a Japanese, but please feel free to visit.

I’ve updated my RSS newsfeed to use the Ordered List FeedBurner plugin, I hope, so I should now be outsourcing all my feed subscription services to FeedBurner. You, the reader, shouldn’t notice any difference, and won’t need to change anything, I hope… Please let me know if you have any problems!

UPDATE, 26 January: All seems to be working well, as far as I can see. I was rather pleasantly surprised to see there’s nearly 100 people subscribed to the feed.

I managed to get onto Radio Go Daddy’s show and PodCast in their Strange Domains segment, which was nice. Download the PodCast and wait until about 16 minutes in to find my thirty seconds of fame!

I’d like to say a big thanks to whoever submitted me to the show, but compared to the other sites featured, like the cross-dressing Abe Lincon, I feel so inadequate!

In addition, queued up in my translation files are reports on famous businessmen (with Horiemon making an appearance), flu and Tamiflu, and collectable toys. I’ll also be putting a page up that will offer some readers the ability to make a wee bit of money whilst practicing their Japanese.

With this year being the Year of the Cat (actually Dog, but I dislike dogs) and since I’m in holiday mode, let’s have the obligatory kitten post…

Oh, and since I seem to get a number of people from Google searching for the phrase, in Japanese the standard New Year greeting is あけましておめでとうございます, akemashite omedetou gozaimasu, A Happy New Year!

I’m on holiday from today, so the post frequency will decrease a little, although I do have a couple of interesting surveys queued up regarding electronic money and celebs, and perhaps two other interesting irons in the fire…

I’ve also tarted up the RSS feed with Better Feed, to add a wee footer for the benefit of people syndicating me through LiveJournal who might be wondering where the stuff is coming from.

It’s now just about a month since I moved my site to this new domain, so I think it’s about time for a site news update.

I’ve installed the rather nice ExecPHP PHP pass-through plugin for WordPress and the rather naff, but it works, PHP graphing library LibChart, which I did modify somewhat in order to stop it sorting pie segments and to set the background colour. I suppose I should really add APIs for these functions. Since LibChart is released under the LGPL, if anyone requires my minor modifications, please ask and I will provide. I use ExecPHP only when preparing the post – as I always have to press the Advanced Editing button to get to the Technorati tags, the action of displaying the preview generates the pie chart in my graphics directory, so I can then delete the PHP from the final post, saving some processor overhead and potential file access issues. At some point, however, I should replace the PHP stuff with my own plugin that generates the graph is a slightly simpler fashion. I think having a graphic on most of the stories helps catch the reader’s eye a bit, and serves as a teaser to get them to read beyond the front page.
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With the one hundred post mark fast approaching, and my confidence in the site improving, and in order to give you, the reader, more confidence in who I am, I have decided to add a short biographical page to introduce myself to you. Pleased to meet you!