世論 What Japan Thinks

It’s a wee while since I’ve done a news round-up, so here goes.

First, there’s a rather new site, Trans-Pacific Radio, that does mostly politics-related stories on Japan and East Asia, often covering the news that other services either don’t translate or just scratch the surface of. They’ve got both a blog and regular podcasts (or netcasts, if you prefer), which I must admit I’ve not listened to yet, so please pay them a visit.

Talking of netcasts, now my new phone has a built-in audio player, what I’d really love to find is an RSS feed to SD Audio converter utility, so I could automatically add the casts to my mini SD card for listening to on the way to work. Anyone know of such a beast? Also, does anyone recommend a good tool to downsample video to mobile phone size, or to strip off the audio track?

Talking of mobile phones, I managed to view this blog, including the graphs all nicely scaled down, on my Panasonic P702iD, but when I tried adding a comment, Spam Karma crashed (the only problem I’ve ever had with this essential comment spam elimination tool for all bloggers) when trying to do the Captcha. The comment was safely quarantined, however, and could have been recovered if necessary.

Finally, I think I’ve got a touch of the flu coming on, so if I miss a couple of days over the weekend, you know what’s wrong with me.

Looking at my recent search referrers, I couldn’t help but notice what Google is telling me:

http://www.google.com/search?q=most popular japanese blog

Which, at the time of writing, gives me none other than this very site as the top hit!

Talking of Google hits, I had one rather obsessive Canadian trying:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=her OR with OR without OR prettier OR nearsighted “glasses”&start=680

What on earth was this person looking for?

Just a bit of site news to tell you that I’ve got the new Blogads code up and running, so space can be purchased on my blog at quite reasonable rates, starting from US$15 for 500 characters for three months. (Correct as of posting date, and all advert prices are subject to change without any notice, and all adverts subject to approval or rejection)

I believe there is someone who has bought Google AdWords to run on this site, based on the fact that I have a non-zero (but still negligible) advert CPM (per thousand page views). Purchasing Blogads will get your ad on every page of the blog for a guaranteed length of time at a fixed cost, with no extra costs for click-throughs, etc. Three months will get you around 50,000 page views (given current traffic rates, client-side ad blocking software permitting), working out at about 30 cents CPM. Direct purchasing from Blogads also helps me out as I get 70% of the fees rather than relying on the vagaries of Google to determine how much I might or might not receive.

Thank you all for your continued patronage! We now returned to our scheduled blogging.

Starting from tonight, I’m on holiday (luckily not heading back to the UK, given the recent alert) until next Sunday the 20th. During that time, I’ll probably be too busy doing nothing to update as regularly as I usually do, and you may see more short surveys and perhaps lower quality than normal, starting from the very next post. You have been warned!

This isn’t an unseasonal survey, but as you may have noticed (or not, if you’re one of my RSS or LiveJournal readers) I’ve had a redesign! After getting a recent comment from Sho:

Love your site, but I must admit I don’t like the design much. That will scare a lot of people off.

I thought I should really update it. Perhaps when I chose the old theme it reflected my mood, so now thanks to the happy pills I’ve moved away from Journalized Winter to the brighter and slightly Web two point naught-ish rounded boxes of Nearly-Sprung.

It was pretty difficult finding a nice clean three-column theme with the centre story option; there’s quite a few with two right-hand or left-hand narrow columns, and Mike Little’s other Journalized themes were still a bit grey at the edges. So, I grabbed Nearly-Sprung (it’s a pun on Almost Spring, the two-column theme that it is a reworking of) and have been hacking at it for a few days. If you notice anything out of place or otherwise looking broken, please give me a shout. I’d be especially interested in knowing if it looks strange in your browser. I feel the base font is perhaps just too small. What do my readers think?

I’ll be updating the advert colour palettes shortly, so no need to remind me about that! Also, all existing graphs have grey backgrounds, and I don’t have time to regenerate them all, but new ones should be white. My pie chart library doesn’t support transparent backgrounds, unfortunately.

Finally, when testing my theme, I found the small Preview Theme plugin from Ryan Boren rather useful.

For the benefit of those of you reading through the RSS feed (or those who are ad-blind), note that I have now placed in prime position in the top left of my blog a spot for advertising through BlogAds. I’ll spare you all the sales pitch; just click the link if you want more details. I’ll try to be fussy about what I accept – I wouldn’t want to subject you to anything I don’t think is in keeping with the main themes of this blog, but conversely I will be welcoming of topical commercial advertising.

As I know there’s a lot of WordPress bloggers out there using Optimal Title so that their blog title ends up with the story title before the blog title, because if the full title gets truncated by a search engine, the important story part is less likely to get the chop.

However, if you add into the mix Jerome’s Keywords (a plugin I heartily recommend to anyone), one problem you may soon notice is that if you don’t add a custom tag results page, the title for tag lookups like http://whatjapanthinks.com/tag/plugin ends up as merely the default blog name, which is rather poor from a search engine perspective.
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I’ve installed Spam Karma 2 and Bad Behaviour in the hope of reducing the comment spam – before with just the built-in blacklisting I was having to set all GMail posters to moderated status, for instance, and it was a losing battle tracking the ever-changing splogs. I get about 10 to 20 or so spam comments and trackbacks per day here.

My blog no longer appears on the Google front page when searching for what japan thinks from my home and work PCs at least, although it’s nice to see that I am being correctly syndicated by a couple of news sources, even though nobody asked me before doing it!

Finally, I’m Blog of the Week at Planet Japan Podcast Episode 48, so it seems, but I haven’t had time to listen to it yet! The bit about What Japan Thinks starts at 13 minutes and 34 seconds into the show, so please pay them a visit!

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!