July Japan Blog Matsuri Announcement

Ten photographers, many of them fellow JapanSoc members,  have teamed up to share their views of Japan on a weekly basis.  The collection of images already is quite impressive  – from the city to the country and from very traditional to ultra-modern the site shares a variety of different images that all reflect the sensibilities and “eye” of the photographers involved.

If you love a good image then we hope you will enjoy the compilation found at The View From Japan.

Follow @viewfromjapan on twitter for links to the latest images…

For more information on the Japan Blog Matsuri, please read about it on the FAQ.

Get your entries into Billy quick smart!

Now, with this latest update, there’s an RSS feed for your Must Read page.

You can also access that RSS feed (and any other user’s Must Read feed) from a user’s profile page, under RSS Feeds.

For more ways to fine tune the content you see on JapanSoc, check out Story Filtering!

Until now, if you wanted to follow someone on JapanSoc, you would click their avatar and then click the follow icon in the social bar. What would happen next is a new page would load telling you that you were now following the user, and then you’d have to click the back button to get back where you were. That wasn’t actually too bad unless you wanted to follow or unfollow a bunch of people in one sitting, in which case it was incredibly tedious to go back and forth between pages.

Now I’ve made it all work with Ajax so you can stay on the same page the whole time while you add or remove followers from the social bar.

I also made a couple of bug fixes. First, I’ve stopped use of the Enter key in social bar forms (Quick Message and Find User) because it broke the page if you pressed it. The other bug fix is thanks to Shibuya, who suggested I make related links on the final story submission page open in a new tab or window so users don’t get chucked out of the story submission process.

The best thing about having an RSS feed for your own articles on JapanSoc is that you can use it to encourage your readers to vote for your posts. I thought about making a Wordpress plugin that you could put on your site, but Wordpress already has a built in RSS widget, so let’s use that instead…

1. Go to your profile by clicking your name or avatar in the social bar (you must be logged in);
2. Click the RSS Feeds link;
3. Right-click Stories submitted from [your] website and copy the link location to your clipboard;
4. Go into your Wordpress dashboard and find Widgets under Appearance in the navigation menu. Add an RSS widget and paste the link you copied into the URL field. Give the feed a title, click Done and Save Changes;
5. Your RSS widget is finished and should be visible in your blog’s sidebar.

I hope you enjoyed that fancy picture!

Tags are back

Tags have always been used in JapanSoc for search results, but for presentation reasons they were hidden from view earlier this year. Now they are back as a small tag icon next to the category on story pages. Clicking that icon will reveal the tags, and clicking a tag gives you a page of search results for that tag.

Improved relevance in related links

It’s always a bit frustrating to see relevant stories not included in the list of related links on either a story page or the final stage of story submission. I’ve made some changes to improve the accuracy of the links and I’m quite impressed with the results. Here’s a before and after shot of Shibuya’s Samurai Underwear story:

Incidentally, although only 10 are shown in this example, up to 20 related links are now shown on story pages, and 15 on story submission step 3.

Story titles must be original

I’m always pulling my hair out when people submit stories with the exact same title as the original, plus the blog name. In the first screenshot above, you’ll see this hideously long title:

Japan’s birthrate up for third straight year in 2008 as population decline continues Japan Economy News & Blog – Business, Economy, Real Estate, Marketing and Economic Reports

The reason this happens is because JapanSoc automatically fills in the submission form with the original title, but it does that so you can conveniently edit it, not leave it as it is. If you don’t change it, there’s a very good chance that the JapanSoc link will rank higher in Google than the original story, which isn’t very fair to that blogger. E.g.

I’ve now added a check to see if the titles match, and if they do, you have to go back and change it to something different. On the error page, I give this example:

…if the original title is New Kimura Takuya Movie, you could change it to Kimu-Taku Stars in New Film.

Of course, there’s always the chance that someone will change just one character, or even worse, remove the original blog name from the title, which would make this example: “Japanese Newspaper Headlines < JapanSoc”

Major bug fix

This last one’s hard to explain, but there was a nasty bug that once in a while caused duplicate stories, stories that didn’t exist, or stories that linked to different stories! It only affected about 1 in 50 submissions, but I tracked it back to a tricky character encoding issue caused by Japanese fonts. I’m very happy to say that bug has now been fixed… touch wood.

I’m chuffed to bits with the progress I’ve been making on JapanSoc lately. If you haven’t seen all the new features, click back a few posts and catch up!

To get some of this Twitter link kove, you’ll need to have put your Twitter username in your Settings page on JapanSoc. Don’t forget that I accidentally wiped all the profile data a few days ago, so you’ll have to put it back in if you haven’t already.

Also note that the JapanSoc tweets are fed from Twitterfeed so there is often a long wait between posting a story and seeing it on Twitter.