世論 What Japan Thinks

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 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.

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!

I’m having to moving across everything by hand from my old site! There is a script to do it automatically, but as I need to go through all the posts and add the categories, it’s almost as fast, I suppose, to do it by hand.

I’m also listed on Google already! Searching for “what japan thinks” shows me on the front page already. My old site, after almost three months of hard blogging, is still languishing down on the ninth page…

This blog will soon be moving! Thanks to Blogger I got the confidence to start blogging, but performance (clicking New Post, for instance, often takes close to a minute to load) and uptime recently has been pretty poor, I think, and the final straw was an update at the weekend that broke posting from Opera – it would only publish a blank page. I eventually chose to sign up with the guys at BlueHost:

The new address is http://www.whatjapanthinks.com (hopefully the DNS is working), and I selected BlueHost as it seemed to be one of the best deals around, although I can’t get their auto install of WordPress to work! That’s another thing, I’m migrating to WordPress as the categories are pretty essential for getting the surveys organised and making it easier for the readers to navigate the site.

UPDATE: Finally managed to get it installed after about six attempts, both automatic and manual. Hurrah!

I’m having a rest from translation today, so instead I’ll post a few interesting stats of my own. Google AdSense last month earned enough beer money for one 500 ml can of Asahi Super Dry at vending machine prices, and at this rate it will be sometime in the summer of 2008 when I actually break the $100 minimum payout balance! I passed 2,000 visitors yesterday, averaging about 40 or so per day, but much of that is through BlogExplosion. However, about 20% of my hits are from other sources, which is nice. I’m the 53th most authoratitive blog on Japan, according to Technorati. Got a Page Rank of , but still languishing on page 10 of Google when searching for my blog title, but people still get here from Google searches that suggest my nearest Google cached index is wonky, or something – I’m fourth on page 10 from home, but eighth from work. I surprise myself with some of the statistics I translate, like the dekichatta kekkon stuff yesterday. Must add the Google section targetting stuff to get my sidebar ignored and blog entry highlighted to hopefully reduce the number of rather useless blog-related ads that appear. Shiron is ticking along nicely too, with people picking up articles from both places. Nonsense feels more popular than facts, however. I’d love to buy a domain name and dedicated host, but I need a decent recommendation and a good excuse to part with the money!

UPDATE: Got a link to one of my articles from the Lost Budgie – thanks! My first proper inbound link that I didn’t have to ask for!

Things are ticking along quite nicely now. I’ve launched a sister blog to this one, 私論 – Shiron – What I Think that covers more chatty personal blog stuff on the whole, and perhaps the occasional rant about life in Japan. Excuse the rather egotistical title, but I might as well be up front about it!

Search engines are looking good – Google rating for the site itself using the blog’s title is still rather poor, but other keywords seem to work quite well! Search logs show a few good hits from Google, MSN and Yahoo! (about 10% of my traffic is now from search or directories), but not Google Blogs, however. Blog Explosion still ticks along, but I’m using it in a much more efficient manner now, I hope. I’ve done a few trackbacks and blog comment postings to get the word around, but I’m still to get even one decent incoming link outside of directories. Also, as there seems to be a Google Page Rank update going on at the moment, I find according to a site I can’t find again that my Page Rank has jumped from 0 to 4, mostly, I think, thanks to Jim Breen and his fine list of Japan-related links. I’d be lost without his WWWJDICT to hand for my translation needs.

It’s a bit disappointing, however, that my other blog has got more comments for the mindless nonsense that I’ve written there than this place, where I’ve put in well over 100 hours of effort in the last two months! Oh well, but at least I’m writing this as a reference source, not as a popularity contest.

I’m still to earn beer (singular) money from my AdSense – I think I could just afford to buy a cheap and nasty chuhai right now from Google.

The bad news: I had a complaint from one of the people whose material I translated due to my rather blatant spicing up of the story for hits. That experiment worked far too well, resulting in a 50% increase in traffic due to a wonky algorithm in MSN Search, which had decided to promote me to second place for various pr0n-related keywords. I’ve deleted the original and reposted a cleaned-up translation.

Sorry folks, but real life is still very busy, and may be hectic for another couple of weeks as I’m studying for a kanji exam that should be quite tricky, given my total inability to write kanji properly! I’ve also decided I should open another blog to allow my more creative side (if I have one, of course) to develop, or at least just provide an outlet for general moaning about Japan, life and everything, and a test-bed for various blogging tools and stuff. I’ll officially announce it once I get it set up correctly and get a wee bit of content.

I’ve had an embarrassingly huge amount of hits for my H*T N*K*D J*P*N*S* T**NS post! Almost 25% of my traffic for a week came in through Technorati tags, and just this week I’ve got into the MSN Search index and been having a steady flow of hits from pervie searches. I’ve had but one Google hit in all the time I’ve been in there, but MSN Search seems to be turning up the goods for me.