First up, blog counts:

• French Judo Blogs: 10
• Spanish Judo Blogs: 25
• English Judo Blogs: 124

Interestingly, when I look at the traffic on the site, English beats Spanish by very little with French quite a way behind. That is except for last month (August 2011) when the french part of the site was most heavily visited; I presume due to the World Championships being held in Paris.

I am very fortunate that Ibai looks after the Spanish part of the site, seeing as I don’t speak Spanish. If you would like to see a version of the site in your language, please do contact me. I would very much like to add a Japanese section in the near future and increase the number of French sites included. German is probably next after Japanese.

Those of you looking for the iPhone application may have noticed it is no longer on the AppStore, this will be remedied soon and I hope to start development on the app again soon.

Development on the site has stalled considerably with my hectic travel schedule and trying to keep my “real job” going. Also I launched a new web project recently, CarMindr.com which is a car MOT reminder service. That has been absorbing what little freetime I have had. But it has been live for a month now and is stable, so I can shave a little time for PlanetJudo and for blogging.

As always, any suggestions, questions, ideas, complaints welcomed via email to lw@judocoach.com

Lance

The PRO app is available at: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/planet-judo-pro/id397126465?mt=8
The app costs 59 pence in the UK and every purchase helps keep the http://www.planetjudo.com website up. You’d be suprised at how much traffic this little site gets and how often we’ve had to up the hosting bandwidth allotment and that all costs money.

The website itself of course will remain free, as does the lite version of the iphone app ( http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/planet-judo-lite/id369608461?mt=8 ).

We have an Android app built, we just need a device or two to test it on, then we’ll be making that available too.

All feedback would be appreciated.

Lance

the French Language version of PlanetJudo is now live at http://www.planetjudo.com/french and is our second language specific version of Planet Judo after Ibai helped create http://www.planetjudo.com/spanish

Along with the new version, I have made some small changes to the site like adding different flags, a favicon and improving the speed performance for the Spanish site (hopefully anyway).

The French site only has a small number of feeds and the translation is not good. I’d appreciate any help you might be able to give in getting the terminology correct.

Lastly… I have added a donate button to the front page http://www.planetjudo.com As the site is getting bigger and more popular, the bandwidth consumption keeps going up as does the storage for the website. This all costs money to keep online, so if you find the site useful to you and have a few bucks/pounds/euros to spare, please consider clicking on the donate button on the front page and supporting the cause.

Whats next?

The next steps I’d like to take with the site are to create a German language version of the site in the short term and to completely re-write the code that runs the site in the long term. German was the close second in the vote that saw French chosen as the latest language version, so I’d like to progress that in the next month or so (any German speakers able to help?). I am also contemplating a Japanese version.

In the longer term, I would like to look in depth at the code that runs in the background to see if I can make it run faster. And more importantly to try and make the process of managing the site, adding new languages, etc easier and less work. I also want to lessen the load on the server. So again a few donations would really show me that people care about the site and the service it provides bringing all the Judo blogs together to make them easier to follow and easier to find.

Of course, if you find any problems on the site, just email me ( lw@judocoach.com ).

Yours in Judo,

Lance

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:

• Japanese
• French
• German

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

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

1. Faster, faster, faster! So the site was struggling under the strain of increasing visitors and more feeds (with more content). So I have made a couple of changes to improve the caching of the pages and of the RSS feed. This should make the site load faster for you when you visit the site; whilst maintaining the fresh-nish of the data.
2. iPhone optimised site faster. As a result of the improvements in the site generally, the iPhone specific site is running much better.
3. Twitter integration continues, it’s still running nicely.
4. More blogs! This week I launched a new website I am partnering on http://martialconversations.com this is a social networking site for martial artists, including Judoka. So I am looking forward to adding some of the blogs from there to the site as they develop!
5. Spanish site continues to grow! Thanks to Ipai for the hard work the Spanish site is growing, please do forward your Spanish Language Judo sites to me for inclusion.

Lance

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.