tokyographers

As I predicted, a busy weekend meant little time for updating the news. I just got back from Easter celebration with the family and then the Japan Nite concert, and I have work in a few hours, so the news will be light and late today. I’ll catch up over the course of the week.

As for Japan Nite, it was awesome, and I’ll be putting up a post about that too in the near future.

Some personal news! This Friday, I’m starting a new job. I’m really looking forward to it, especially since it’s in the Japan-related industry. I won’t say much more about it here, but maybe I’ll be able to share some details in the future.

The reason I mention it is that it’s going to affect the Tokyograph news schedule. I’m switching from a nighttime job to a regular daytime job, which means that I’ll no longer be available in the early afternoon to read the news from Japan and update right away. I still plan to keep the news output at about the same rate, but new stories will now be appearing several hours later than usual. I’m hoping it’s not a big deal, but I’m mentioning it so that I can point to this post when people start asking why the news isn’t as fast as it used to be.

(By the way, if you saw the recent poll about being a day person or night person, I fall under the latter category. And on top of that, I have to retrain my sleep schedule!)

On a related note, the past couple days I’ve also been a bit behind in the news - this is partly due to me trying to finish off everything for my old job, and partly due to the awesomeness that is Super Smash Bros. Brawl (yes, I’ll admit I’ve been slacking in favor of some video game time).

Updates in the near future may also suffer, due to the job transition, the Easter holiday, relatives visiting in a week from now, and yes, SSBB. In particular, I may not get much news done this Friday (as I finish my old night-time job on Thursday and then start my new daytime job the next morning) and this Sunday (spending Easter with the family, then going to the Japan Nite show). Don’t hate me for late news.

If you have any questions or concerns about all of this, drop me a line in the comments or by email. Also, if you’d like to help out in improving the site’s news coverage, feel free to offer your services
Anyway, wish me luck with my new job (and everything else)!

Sorry to everyone about the slow updates for Daily Japan and the misc. news. There’s a bunch of stuff in the backlog, but I just don’t have the time to get to it since the main page news takes priority. My schedule’s been pretty hectic lately, and I hope it eases up in the near future so I can take care of this stuff - though don’t get your hopes up since the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl may just keep me away from doing my work!

First things first: I’m probably going to shut down TokyoGraph Link in the very near future. For those who don’t know, it’s the experimental social bookmarking site I launched a few months ago. So why is it closing? Well, I found out through What Japan Thinks that there’s another Japan-related bookmarking site called JapanSoc, which you should all check out.

The site runs on the Pligg content management software, which I didn’t know about before, or else I would’ve used it instead of trying to build something from scratch. This means that JapanSoc has a lot of functionality that I haven’t had time to implement yet. And the site is better connected to all the J-bloggers out there. Overall, it makes more sense to scrap the broken site here and support the one that has already tapped into the community somewhat. There are also some neat tools like a bookmarklet and a FeedFlare to make things easier for both sharers and publishers.

I’ll be keeping TokyoGraph Link up until I can code a replacement feed for the Tokyograph front page (hopefully this weekend). I recommend signing up for JapanSoc already!

This New Year’s greeting comes a little late, but I’ve been pretty busy lately with the end of the year. I’m a bit behind on some stuff (as usual), and I’ll be on a quick vacation this Friday (so no news), but I hope to be back on track soon after that. I have a lot of plans for Tokyograph this year that I hope I can implement in the near future.

So how did the site do in 2007? It’s hard to believe that it’s been about a year and a half already since I’ve started it, though I guess I didn’t start getting really serious until about a year ago, so this is kind of like it’s real 1st birthday. I’ve learned a lot and the site has seen a lot of growth as people are finding out about it, but it still has a long way to go.

For some idea of how small the site was a year ago, let me look back at what I wrote in April:

• Last month (February), we reached 8800 visits from about 3900 unique sites. This month (March), we jumped to over 12000 visits from more than 5000 unique sites.
• The RSS subscriber base is currently in the 50s with a peak of 62. At the end of February, we had almost 30.

That was a pretty big jump back then, going from 8,800 visits and 3,900 sites to 12,000 visits and 5,000 sites, plus an RSS subscriber base jump from 30 to about 60. But fast forward to December… 104,000 visits from 40,000 sites! Wow! In terms of RSS subscribers, we’ve been hovering around 410-420 lately. And our Technorati rank is about 19,500, which is pretty good when you consider that there are millions of blogs out there.

Still, we’re aiming to reach more people, so we’ll continue to work hard in 2008! And to everyone who’s been following the site so far, thank you all! Don’t worry, Tokyograph is also looking into ways to express that thanks with contests and giveaways, so stick with us!

Well, technically I was already sick, but now I’ve caught something worse, and I really feel ill. There are several stories I wanted to write up right now, but I’m struggling even to keep from falling over. Hopefully I feel better in the morning and can catch up on some of it.

I’ve made some changes to the search function (on the main site) that I hope will make it more useful to everyone.

First, I changed the search settings so that it can find words as short as 2 characters. Previously, it was using the default of 4, which meant you couldn’t look up things like “V6″ or “NHK” or people’s names that only used 2 or 3 kanji.

Second, I’ve set it up so that the search will match all words you type in. Before, I had it in regular boolean mode - this meant that if you type in “ayumi hamasaki”, the search would match either “ayumi” or “hamasaki” without requiring both (unless you added + signs in front of both words). Now, if you search for “ayumi hamasaki”, it will only return results that include both.

It looks like my computer has recovered, though I’m not yet sure if it’s permanently fixed. I thought I might have needed a new motherboard, but perhaps it was just a temporary issue. In any case, it now means I can get back to working on improving the site, so yay!

Also, if I can stop being so lazy, expect some new articles to go up.

I’ve been having some issues with my desktop in the last two days. I’m trying to not let it affect my work on the site, but there are some new features I’ve been working on that may be delayed. News should still be updated regularly.

Meanwhile, I hope everyone has been enjoying the new Polls feature. Make sure to support your favorite actor in the current Ikemen Battle! Also, if you have any questions you’d like to see in future polls, just drop me a line.

I’ve also added a chatbox to the forums (as suggested by pixie464). It’s lonely at the moment, so go ahead and say hi!

I’ve been working on the redesign for the site (which includes both backend and frontend), and I’ve finished off the first stage. A quick rundown of some changes:

• All of the major stuff (news, database, articles, feeds) and the additional sections (links, forums, blog) are still intact. The events/birthdays calendar is also working.
• Rankings and releases are gone for now, until I can build in more automation into those sections.
• Search now works (or at least, much more than before). It functions in boolean mode, so typing in something like Yuko Takeuchi will match either Yuko or Takeuchi. If you want to match both, put + signs in front of both words, or you can put quotes around it.
• The front page now summarizes the news, articles, links, blog, and forums. The old version had just news stories - if you prefer that, you can jump straight to http://www.tokyograph.com/news/ though I’m considering the option of making the front page customizable.
• Color scheme is obviously different. For those that prefer the old color scheme (or something else), I’m hoping to make multiple skins for more customizability.
• The articles are now listed under the “articles” subdirectory rather than the “features” subdirectory. From now on, articles will only be found under the new folder, but for the sake of keeping the old links live, articles written before now can still be found at their old urls.
• Some searches are now limited where they weren’t before. For some of these, I’ll be adding AJAX controls to let you navigate multiple pages of results.

I’m sure there are still some bugs to work out - let me know if you spot anything wrong. And I know this doesn’t look exactly the same in IE, but hopefully it’s close enough (it should be in at least IE7, not sure about previous versions). Safari and Opera should also be rendering it fine, though I can’t be certain.

Anyway, I hope you all like the changes! Give me some feedback and suggestions, too. I’ll be slowly rolling out new features from here on out, but I may need to take a small break first! On that note, I may be gone for part of this weekend, so expect the possibility of no news updates this Sunday.