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.
