Announcing Major Changes to the Blog
(日本語版あり)
I have exciting news for the very few readers of this blog.
The site, which will celebrate its ninth anniversary this October, is getting a huge makeover that will make it easier for all readers to navigate through the contents.
Many of the benefits are associated with splitting the Japanese content from the English content that enables English-only readers to avoid the clutter created by incomprehensible Japanese characters.
But there is much more.
URL
The first big announcement is the URL change.
The blog, which has been hosted on wordpress.com from its inception, has moved to a new, personal domain, www.joesas.net as well as a more catchy www.sassyjoe.net.
Now that the URL address is simpler and easier to remember, I’m hoping that all of you will remember to visit my blog more often than once a year.
Look and Feel
The site’s look and feel has gone through a complete remake.
Whereas the goal of the old site was simplicity, the new site seeks to combine more color, accessibility and readability.
The update is accompanied with various new features to encourage engagement, like easier sharing of posts on social media and ratings of posts.
Although it’s late in coming, a Related Posts feature has also been added. This feature should provide a fairly reliable recommendation of posts in light of my clean-up of tags and categories.
Dual Language Support
As many of you no doubt noticed, the number of posts in Japanese on this blog has been increasing lately. This has made it cumbersome for English readers to navigate through Japanese content to get to the English material.
In conjunction with the renewal of the site, I have split the Japanese content from the English. This means that if you can only read English, you no longer have to scroll through weird and incomprehensible characters.
For those who are able to read Japanese, the great news is that English and Japanese versions of the sites are linked; you will be able to easily access the Japanese version of the post, if there is one, with a click of a button.
It’s worth adding tha I have a general policy of writing posts in either English or Japanese, but not both. Thus, to the extent that there are versions in two languages, each is not a translation of the other, even if they are linked. Rather, it is likely that I wrote an English version, then revisited the same topic while writing in Japanese. If you understand the nuances of both languages, I think you’ll enjoy reading and comparing how I wrote anew in two languages on the same idea.
Incidentally, I’ve added Google Translate support throughout the site for those who don’t understand Japanese but who are still interested in trying to comprehend the Japanese posts. Be forewarned, though: the machine translation produces quality that is so bad even I had trouble recognizing some of the original posts. The Google Translate feature may not help you understand what I’m saying in Japanese, but it should serve as a good reminder that, no matter how much machines advance, there will always be a role left for humans.
All existing content and subscriptions have been ported over, and going forward, all posts and notifications will come from the new site.
I hope you enjoy the new site and the look and feel.
