Category: Vanity Publishing

I never thought I would make it this far, but exactly 365 days ago, at 4:14 am on May 16, 2002, I started this weblog. I wrote then that I wouldn’t be surprised if this lasted 5 days, which was how long my previous attempt at blogging had lasted.

I don’t really know why I started this, somehow in some convoluted fashion I read the term “blog” somewhere and clicked further to find out what this hopelessly horrid-sounding term could represent. The next thing I knew (it literally was only 2 or 3 days later) I was downloading Movable Type and posting my first entries. (For a brief and incomplete list of who inspired me, see my “parent blogs” on the left of this Blogtree page).

I never go back and look at those entries now, I find them embarrassing in the extreme, written as I flailed about trying to find this blog’s raison d’être. Politics was an easy target — and for some un-explained reason, particularly the Arab-Israeli conflict — and you’d be hard-pressed to find anything remotely related to what this blog has evolved into, in those moments that I allow myself to think this blog actually has some sort of definable raison d’être. Certainly I could have been in Timbuk 2 for all the writing I did about Japan at that time. For some reason, it just didn’t feel appropriate or “right.” How things have changed. Now, I feel it would be inappropriate or wrong if I didn’t talk about Japan (some of the time, that is). I have a few people to thank for that, mainly Kiyo (where forth hath thou gone, my friend?) and M. I came close to giving up the ghost more than once, and for perservering I have my loyal readers to thank, for their comments and emails, and their visits, even when a month went by without a post.

My clock says 4:13 so it’s time to put this stake into the virtual ground, and get started on the next year. I hope you’ll stick around and see how this goes. I personally have no idea, and frankly I’d have it no other way.

Here’s a bit of housekeeping: I’ve added a new feature to the blog (actually, “feature” is a bit overblown; let’s just say a little widget), in the right-hand margin underneath the latest Moblog post. Basically, it’s a little running list of links I’ve found interesting or worthy of linking to. (There’s nothing much there yet, but give it time).

I pretty much stole the idea from Jason Kottke‘s Remaindered Links sidebar, though in my feeble defense, I’ve been wanting to do something like this ever since I saw Anita Rowland‘s “Daily Crawl,” a long constantly updated list of sites she’s reading (in her left sidebar). (Here’s serendipity for you: just now I checked Anita’s site and see that she just “crawled” me, and I’m listed next to kottke.org!)

I’ve never been much of a “link and run” blogger, but I do come across some things I feel like sharing in case they haven’t “made the rounds.” This new widget allows me to do that without bogging down the main content portion with lots of tiny links all over the place.

(I’ve usurped the name “Of Momentary Interest,” which was my title for non-Japan blogs I read, for this new widget, and renamed the section formerly known as “Of Momentary Interest” the boring but descriptive “Non-Japan Reads.”)

I just wanted to publicly thank some fellow bloggers who have helped me this past week:

For helping me get my moblog up and running, I’d like to thank Kevin Cameron (Bastish.net) for his generous and selfless efforts to create Moblogging for Other People, and continued work to make it better for its users, and proselytizing on behalf of moblogging and where it might lead. And all this from someone who doesn’t even own a mobile phone! Thanks also to Jeffrey Wood (snapturtle) who patiently answered my questions about his Moblog and PHP.

Lil (esthet.org) and Jean Snow (jeansnow.net) were extremely helpful in helping me debug a problem I had this week with how my site was displaying on IE for the Mac. Considering I don’t own a Mac nor really know anyone nearby who does, I was reliant on their taking the trouble to QA my site as I tweaked this and that control, and to send me screenshots of the progress. Without their help and suggestions as to how to fix the problem, I wouldn’t have been able to fix it.

Lil also alerted me to a problem with respect to how my fonts were appearing on IE for the Mac, most likely as a result of changing the encoding of this page so it could display Japanese characters. (I will say that one thing I’ve learned this week: if I ever do get a Mac, I’m going to use Safari as my browser!) For help with this problem (I’m not sure in the end that I ever fixed it, but I’ve changed the encoding back and I’m going to leave it as it is for now), thanks go to M (Nippon Daze and Ken Loo (Ken Loo’s World).

Thanks everyone!