Hi all,
Image from Wikipedia
just a quick note to say that the French language version of PlanetJudo is progressing well. So far I have added a few sites (ok nine sites) and done some initial translations of the site itself into French. It needs reading over by a native French speaker, so volunteers please let me know.
Lance
Hi Everyone,
thanks to everyone who voted and emailed about what language we should do next here at PlanetJudo.com.
The result is that French will be the next language version we add here.
And this is where YOU come in!
As I build PlanetJudo’s French version, I need to find all the great French language blogs about Judo that are out there on the Interne. I also need to translate the PlanetJudo messages into French. So, if you know a good French Judo site (with an RSS feed preferably) please drop me an email or comment on this blog post. Also if you would like to help even more and help administer the French language version of this site, please contact me ( lw@judocoach.com ).
As soon as it is built and some sites are added I shall let you know!
Lance
Hi everyone,
2010 is here and the Judo world is talking, talking alot! And blogging lots too. PLanetJudo is getting busier and busier month on month and more and more international. The launch of our Spanish language version (thanks Ibai!) has resulted in a big increase in traffic and has proven to me that expanding the site to cope with other languages is a great idea.
So, there is the question for you all, what language should PlanetJudo.com support next?
The obvious choices from my mind are:
For a start, but Korean, Portugeuse and many others need to be considered.
So, which languages would you like to see incorporated here, in what order? It would be amazing if someone like Ibai could contact me for each language. In case you don’t know, I don’t speak Spanish, so Ibai has been the person finding and adding Spanish language Judo blogs for the site (I think I have added in total two, he has added all the rest). So if you are a keen reader of Judo blogs and your native language is something other than English please do email me ( LW@JUDOCOACH.COM ) and express an interest in helping create and maintain a list of blogs about Judo in your language.
For those of you who just want a say, please leave a comment, and/or vote in the poll below.
Yours in Judo,
Lance
Today is a special day for me, http://www.planetjudo.com has reached a milestone. There are now 100 (english language) blogs in the system!
I don’t actually recall how many sites were in the very first version of this site, but it was definately less than 20, maybe a dozen!
And now there are 100 Judo blogs being tracked and promoted on this site, that is very very cool!
What does it mean?
To me, it means that the Judo world is slowly coming online, more people are appreciating the opportunity we have with the web to learn and share. No longer does Judo discussion have to be on the tatami, no longer is it that the only opinions and knowledge you can learn from be that of only those in your club.
Now, you can read posts from world level players and coaches right down to those just starting out. We have national governing body, board members on here (at least two). And it it keeps growing! This year we added Spanish language blogs and next year I want to add Japanese and other languages (If you want to help let me know, I’m looking for people to add sites in their languages; I sadly only speak English).
With the growth in online Judo content, the opportunity for students of Judo to discover and share has never been greater. We can all watch videos of competitions and and other Judo events online and as the Judo blogosphere continues to grow you will be able to read the thoughts of those creating great Judo. And you can share your experiences so that others can benefit from your perspective.
The perfect example I use when talking to coaches and others about blogging is the blog of Ronda Rousey, the US Judo athlete who won a medal in Beijing last year. As a male coach, who never competed at Olympic level, I have no idea whatsoever what it is like to be a female athlete competing at that level. HOWEVER… by following Ronda’s blog, I was more able to understand it. And importantly I have pointed young female athletes at the blog and it spoke even more directly to them.
As a coach, it is my role to help athletes learn, and for me that does not mean that I have to spoon feed every drop of knowledge into them. For me, the growing Judo blogosphere is a tool I can use to help athletes progress. As more and more people in Judo start to blog, the more resources I have at my disposal.
My hope for 2010 is that even more of you start blogging, no matter what your level. Write about your yellow belt grading, or your World Cup victory. Talk about the mat burn and how you cope; talk about how you have tweaked your uchi mata. Talk about how Kata is sharpening your technique and how kata is sharpening your mind for shiai.
I find that the act of blogging helps me think through ideas and remember things more clearly, I always kept a training diary as an athlete, so blogging is I guess a long form version of the same thing for me.
So here is my request, in 2010 start a blog and email the address so me so I can include it here.
If you don’t know how or are not convinced why, then email me and I’ll talk you through it all.
Lance
lw@judocoach.com
(Creator of www.PlanetJudo.com)
It has been a long time since I posted on the PlanetJudo.com/blog and since the site started things have grown and grown.
Back when the site started there were about 20 Judo blogs, now there are almost 100! In fact there are far more than that there are now 23 blogs on the Spanish language version of the site (Thanks Ibai!). And there are many sites that I don’t have on the site yet I know. Please do email me with any sites you know are missing!
It has been very interesting and rewarding to watch the Judo Blogosphere grow and grow not only in size but as a community. I always enjoy it when I see a thread run across multiple blogs. When authors of various blogs write about each others opinions is awesome and what it should all be about! There are some amazing bloggers in our community of all levels.
The traffic to the site has grown and grown, we’ve had to continually grow the bandwidth allocated and although at times it stretches the finances, it is worth it to watch the Judo online community grow and grow and provide ideas and discussion for all and anyone who cares to read it. This has been apparent with the recent rule changes where the Blogosphere has been actively discussing and debating the various implication.
Bravo all!
Now, it is not all flowers and rainbows. Sadly, some of our Judo bloggers seem to be fading… below is a list of Judo blogs that seem to have died out, can you help find out why there feeds have stopped? Can you encourage someone to blog again?
Till next time,
Lance
Hi everyone,
sorry for the brief outage this afternoon/evening.
This was due to PlanetJudo exceeding the bandwidth limits allowed on the server, because of all your lovely visits!
Sorry for the outage, all back to normal now.
Lance
Hi all,
this is a just a post to let people know that several feeds are not working on the site and to ask you the visitor to www.planetjudo.com to help me get them sorted out. Maybe you know the sites or the clubs in question and could talk to someone about the sites?
If anyone can help get these Judo websites back into action and onto PlanetJudo I’d appreciate it.
And as always if you know of a Judo website that you’d like added please let me know and/or contact the website in question.
Lance
lw@judocoach.com
Just a couple of small things to update everyone on:
Lance
Hi everyone,
well having moved the site to a new server I am able to focus on adding functionality to the site, and the first step in this direction is a iPhone optimized version of the site. This is now undertesting on the English language site and assuming it works ok, it will soon be active on the Spanish site also. So if you are an iPhone user, please do check out http://www.planetjudo.com/english/iphone.
I would appreciate any feedback you might be able to give.
This will be followed by a Mac Dashboard widget, which will bring the site to your Mac desktop. 
After all this… well we shall see.
Hi everyone!
Welcome to the new blog for PlanetJudo.com, this is the first post on the blog, which I am adding to the site to help share what is happening on the site, like what blogs have been added or removed.
So What happened this weekend?
This weekend I moved servers, from the previous one to a more powerful session. So the site should run faster now. I also took the opportunity to install WordPress and start this blog. I also changed the structure of the site to cater to different languages, so now we have /english and /spanish subsites. The front page is now a bit different pulling from both sites.
Why do all this?
Well, the site has been struggling with the numbers of people visiting, which has meant it has been very slow loading at times, to the point it looked dead. So the move shall hopefully cure that.
It also seemed like the ideal time to publically release the Spanish language version of the site, which to be frank I have not had much to do with, someone else has been working hard there. More on that in my next post. Given that the site now had a /spanish sub section I got thinking about other languages (Japanese for example) and how I should move the English to the same format, making it easier to manag in the long run. Hence moving the english language version to a sub directory. Luckily the RSS feeds do not need changing, so no problems there. In fact it is easier as the new front page has both feeds available.
From the first start of this site I have tried to include non-english Judo blogs, but sadly machine translation is just awful and it just proved to be a pain, clogging the site with useless entries. I couldn’t read them in English and they were no longer in the native language. I tried leaving them in the native language as well, but that didn’t work for me as I only speak english, and this is basically a project to “scratch my own itch” so if I didn’t like it, it was not going to stay. Now the subsite system works for me and hopefully for you too, if you are lucky enough to read Spanish, you can go to the Spanish subsite and get all the Judo blogs in Spanish in one place, subscibe to updates, all that good stuff!
As for the blog (that you are reading now), for a while I have been wanting to talk aboutthe site and found I did not have a good medium to do so. I have not had a method of telling people what sites have been added or removed for example. So the blog will now serve this purpose, I shall post infrequently about what sites get added, sites with issues, sites removed etc. Hopefully it will let people know what is happening and also encourage people to participate by letting me know about sites that I am missing, etc.
What’s next?
Well, most of the hard work is done, the site is on a newserver and the DNS changes have propogated to most places (annoyingly not my home network yet). I have some cleaning up and tuning of the site to do, mainly making the new front page look and behave like I’d like it too. Then I shall let the site settle down for a while and just do my regular maintenance of adding sites as people tell me about them or I find them. The Spanish site will continue to grow, with the surrounding text being translated shortly into Spanish.
Once everything is as it should be, I plan to create further language specific subsites. Preferably the same way as the Spanish site, with a native speaker becoming involved and managing the subsite (I shall post later this week hopefully about the birth of the Spanish site and the wonderful person who has been helping there!) .
Japanese is obviously a key language, followed most likely by French and German. So if you are interested in being the manager of those language sites then please do drop me an email! Basically it’s not as if there is much hard work, I’ll do the technical stuff, all that is required is adding the sites to the system and helping translate/add the surrounding text for the site. So please let me know if you can help.
So, welcome to the NEW PlanetJudo.com website, I hope you like the changes, please let me know if you spot any weirdness.
Lance
P.s. Yes one day I’ll try and do a fancy/sexy Judo layout for the site(s) with nce Judo pictures etc….. one day.