Things at work and outside work have kept me quite busy for the last several weeks. But there was one weekend in January when I just sat down and decided to redesign this site. I had no real image of how I wanted to design the layout, it just kind of evolved over the course of 72 sleepless hours. The result is what you are looking at now, unless you’re using an RSS reader in which case please visit the site. There are still quite a bit of outstanding items to be added and changed but I couldn’t wait any longer so cut it over to production the other night.

This time, I rebuilt the site with WordPress and have abandoned MovableType (Sorry SixApart). I’ve been a loyal MT user and the only reason I switched to WP was because I couldn’t get MT4.0 initialized when I tried to upgrade it, and after searching for hours to find a solution I gave up in frustration. In case you don’t know, documentation for MovableType is absolutely crap considering the fact that they charge money for it. On the other hand, documentation for WP is plentiful and easy to find. I’ve tried WP in the past only to be less than impressed, however after spending more time with it I’ve realized that it’s so much easier to use and manage. As an example, my database when ported over from MT to WP shrunk in size from 128MB to 7MB. That’s because MT stores everything in the database, templates, stylesheets etc. while WP only contains blog content and configurations. When you customize templates you have to FTP them to your server. I suppose there is convenience to be able to administer everything from the MT admin pages but for me this is not a big deal. The only other beef is that WP uses dynamically created pages which may cause bottlenecks at the server but I don’t anticipate 5000pv per day for a while.

Most of the cosmetic changes I made to the template I did for my own satisfaction. All the images along the top and right hand side of the page change randomly when the pages is refreshed. I took all the toy images I had from the old site and display them randomly along the header. At the top right are photos of my retro robot toys. The search box area randomly displays images from classic Japanese films. I especially like the photos of Kaga Mariko. There are about 100 or so photos and I will be adding more all the time. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to support the old layout because it was done on MT and personally I’m kind of sick of it after 4 years, so apologies to those who prefer the old design. You can still see the old site here for comparison (the links are all messed up though). Maybe the new one will grow on you. Still to be added are RSS for comments, featured feeds, photo gallery, preview for comments and a bunch of other little stuff. If you have any suggestions or ideas please let me know in the comments.

Finally, I’m very happy to see that several people have kept my feed in their RSS Reader. To be honest, I didn’t expect anyone would be interested in my relaunch. It’s always nice to receive such kind comments.

Was chatting with Sean over Skype this afternoon about how reading blogs was getting boring and the content on most of them repetitive. It’s such a daily habit with me that reading blogs and RSS feeds has become somewhat like flipping channels on cable TV trying to find something interesting in all that noise. At least with TV there are times when there is nothing to watch. But with the web it just never ends. There’s always something leading to something else. It’s a bottomless pit. It’s gotten to the point where it’s actually affecting my health. I suppose I have a mild addiction to the Internet (don’t we all?) 8 hours at work and another 6 hours at home per day is a bit much, isn’t it?

This feeling is part of the reason that I have not been very enthusiastic about updating this blog for the past few weeks. Not that I don’t enjoy doing it but I try not to post about something unless I feel excited and genuinely passionate about it. Otherwise it’s just a chore, you know. There have been quite a lot of interesting things lately for which I have many unpublished posts, but just haven’t been able to motivate myself to finish. Another reason is simply that there are other things going on in my life that have become more of a priority than getting a blog post published. Nothing bad, in case you were wondering, just some different interests I’m pursuing.

Many good blogs I read often die out after a year or two and I’ve always wondered what happened to those people. Not a word about why their blog disappeared or anything. Did they die? Or did they have a nervous breakdown? Like Justin Hall did online in Jan 2005. In case you don’t know who he is, he’s like the Internet’s first true blogger. Probably most people just lose interest or move on with their lives or whatever. Well, I’m not planning to shut this site down completely, but I will be taking a self imposed hiatus of a couple months to focus on other things and just recharge.

I’ll be back so don’t unsubscribe my blog feed from your RSS reader just yet.

Peace.

This morning when I went to rebuild my top page I noticed that all the Japanese text was coming out all quasi-scandinavian-like. I have no idea why my site is suddenly acting this way. I’ve checked with my hosting centre and they have made no changes to my server and when I look at the DB it appears fine. Anyone know what might be the problem?

EDIT: Hey everyone, thanks for your comments. I suppose I should give more information about this rather strange bug which I can’t get my head around. It’s obviously an encoding bug of some kind although it’s not related to the charset or browser settings which are the usual suspects. When I view the blog posts in the movabletype administration pages and preview pages there are no problems. When I look into the database directly I don’t see any problems either. However, when I rebuild the pages it comes out mojibake. At first I suspected that something happened with jcode.pm which is a perl module required for movabletype to handle Japanese. But I have my Japanese blog in the same installation of my English one and the Japanese blog has no problems whatsoever when I rebuild or edit. It’s only the Japanese text in posts in my English blog (this one) that is having this problem. And it just appeared the other day without any changes made to my blog settings. What’s even weirder is that I have a backup index page which is exactly the same as this one which doesn’t have the problem. I suspect that my hosting server did indeed make some changes to the server, however when I asked them they said that there have been no changes. Hopefully, the solution will come to me in a dream or when I’m taking a shower in the morning. This is usually where I solve most of my problems.

EDIT2: As with most problems, if you just forget about it and let your subconscious brood over it for a while the solution will present itself. I woke up this morning knowing instantly what was wrong. Seems like Danny Choo is out to sabotage my site :-) The RSS widget which displays links to his recent posts were included in every page and there must have been some change to the encoding to that RSS feed since it was messin’ everything up. Or something changed on the server which affects the way the RSS is parse. Who knows. I’ve removed it for the time being and will look into it later when I have time. Thank you all for your ideas!

I added a RSS feed to track comments. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while but just didn’t get around to it. But now that I don’t have mail on my server, I can’t get comments alerts anymore so I have to monitor them via RSS reader. Let me know if there’s anything wrong.

You guys who read my blog via RSS Readers will be happy to know that I decided to do something about those ugly blue borders around the images. I’ve added some css to the img tag so now images in RSS will have the same color as on the regular pages. For some illogical reason, I’ve never really liked using RSS Readers. However, last night I decided to download NetNewsWire and have been subscribing to blogs left and right. Now, I can really waste all my life reading mindless blogs. Please let me know what feeds I should subscribe to.

On the train this morning, a boy about 7 or 8 years old sat down beside me. He started reading a book about Airports around the World and was smiling and laughing and all excited like. It had some nice pictures and I thought it would be more interesting than the book about getting out of debt that I was reading :-(

By the way, I have not gotten any comment spam for the last 3 days. Nothing in my Junk folder either. Have any of you other bloggers out there experienced the same thing? Is this just my blog or have all the comment spammers in the world just given up? Is it still too early to rejoice?

Sent to me by Tomo.

Well, it’s the last day of 2005. How was your year?

In 2005, I posted 435 posts, including this one, and more than 1,500 photos. That’s 1.2 blog posts per day average, almost four times compared to 135 posts in 2004. In retrospect, I think I spent too much time making my site and often using the blog as an excuse not to do “more important stuff”.

Let’s quantify some of this time. If, for example, I spent an hour average on each post, that would be 435 hours of the year. Divide that into working man days of 8 hours. It works out to 54 working days or almost 2.75 months. If you add the extra time I spent taking pictures and planning, that’s a whole bunch more time spent. Was it worth it? Could I have used this time for something more profitable or fulfilling? Who knows? On the positive side, the blog has been a much needed creative outlet and motivated me to get off my butt and do/see things I would normally have otherwise been indifferent to.

For 2006, I plan to try and keep updating daily, but I’m reorganizing my priorities and will be cutting down on time wasted with mindless netsurfing. I don’t consider this site a waste of time but I do spend a lot of hours netsurfing which is becoming as bad a habit as flipping thru channels on TV trying to find something to watch. This is something I want to stop. I was thinking about scheduling daily blog time, say one or two hours a day and limiting my online time to just that. It probably won’t work but we’ll see. Anyway, hope you all have a happy New Year’s Eve!

A few of my favorite posts (for various reasons) from 2005:
Shogatsu 2005
Suica Penguin
Pokémon Jumbo
World’s Longest Advertisement in Tokyo Station
Big Hinamatsuri
Umegaoka
Hanayashiki
I couldn’t do this job
More from Akihabara
Shibuya 1985
Google Earth Tokyo Quiz
It’s OPEN!
Jinba Ittai
Mt. Fuji Drive
Go Deers!
I’m Free!
Nihon Romantic Highway
More GR Photos

I finally got around to doing some housecleaning of this blog’s backend. Over time I created so many different Movable Type modules that I lost track of where I added them. Things like the navigation, header, links etc are kept in small modules for easy management. Only problem is that if I change one of the modules I have to rebuild the entire site. In the beginning, it was fairly quick but as this site has grown, that rebuild time has gotten longer and longer. So now I’ve deleted most of the modules and have turned them into PHP includes. This way I can share one include (like the navigation) across multiple blogs and I don’t need to rebuild the entire site if I add a link or make an edit. Did you notice those numbers in the navigation showing how many posts there are in each category? Those numbers in that blue font are very nice. Just looking at it puts a smile on my face and brings pure joy to my heart! It’s these little things that are what I enjoy the most about tinkering with this site.

Anybody who knows me well enough can tell you that I get tired and bored of things quite quickly and today I was thinking that the design of this blog has just about hit the wall for me and I’m about to rip it down and change it to something completely different. However, since doing that has become a daunting task, the mere thought of having to spend hours upon hours tweaking stylesheets and html and php scripts to get things the way I want is just a big fat turn off. At any rate, I started getting interested in WordPress and decided to install it on my server and give it a test drive. Installation was a piece of cake and I like some of the category features, but the fact that an hour has passed and I still can’t figure out how the hell to change the header says something about it. I mean the first thing anyone wants to change on their blog is the header, right? Well, maybe when I’m feeling better I can give it try again. I imported all the current posts as is into the default WordPress template. It’s not pretty but take a look: HERE Don’t post any comments there cause it may disappear.

If you look down on the right side of my top page you’ll notice that I added a banner for blogshares. This is a site where blogs are listed like companies on a pseudo blog stock market. Once you create an account you can buy and sell shares of different blogs with fake money. Blogs increase in value as they increase in links to them. The site has indicators, sectors, charting and everything just like a real stock market. A real fun way to learn about how the real stock market works. It’s been around for awhile and I’m 2 years late in learning about it. I just IPO’d my site there and it still doesn’t have any market value yet but hopefully my stock price will go up. Anyone wanna buy some shares in my blog?

This morning, I woke up to see that the visits to this site have surpassed 10,000 since Sept.3 of last year. Oh boy! Wooohooo! There are actually more if you count all the trackback pings I’m getting from all the viagra, texas-holdem, online-casino sites that are filling up all my referrer listings. I average about 150-200 unique visitors a day which is about as much as I want. Not really looking for a lot of exposure here. The counter at the top only counts unique visitors to the top pages of each section and compares the IP of the visitor to the last IP saved and if it’s different then it adds an increment. Meaning that if 2 people keep refreshing the top page alternately, the counter will keep increasing. Yes, that’s right it sucks. Anyway, to show my appreciation to all my regular visitors I give each one of you 10,000yen. Click below and print out. Go buy yourselves a nice dinner or a few hours at a Love Hotel.