Japanalyst – A blogging community about Japan and Japanese culture

I know very little about Japan and I’m not part of the Japan blogosphere, but after Chinalyst a Japan based blogger suggested that I duplicate the site to provide the same platform for the Japan based expat bloggers. I spent about 3 hours doing small tweaks and introduced Japanalyst. It hasn’t been doing very well, mainly since there was no one to promote it. Every once in a while I would get an email about something not working and I would reply with “sorry, no time”, and even a few requests to know more about me as the man behind this site were returned with a polite denial.

For technical reasons (Drupal 4.7 end of life, if you must know) I figured it was time I try and upgrade the site into something a bit more normal. It’s been a while since I started building those community websites and I can now say that as long as functionality isn’t too customized I can pretty much do advanced projects within a very short period of time. Since I had some time during this weekend, I thought I’d try and give that upgrade a try. It was far more painful than I thought it would be, trying to maintain all the info that was already there before, but finally – I think it was successful. You be the judge.

Japanalyst includes all that I’ve experimented with this past year. Blogs on a Google map, a blog directory and a social aggregator. Similar functionality to Taiwanderful, with some tweaks to make it work smoother and faster. I think I’m also improving with site design although I still lack the designer eye and advanced CSS techniques.

One thing I wanted to mention, though. The Japanese expat web has gone through some nice changes since I last looked into it while doing the first version of Japanalyst. They now have some impressive projects, such as Japan-Hopper, Japanopedia and JapanSoc which are great for keeping track of the English info about Japan. Lots for the China-Taiwan blogospheres to learn from. When it comes to blog directories, they now have “Blogs on Japan” and “The Japan Blog list” both, although simple, do the job well. Anything for Japanalyst to add? well, each website has its own advantages. I’ll let the Japan expats figure out if they find this useful or not. For me, it was an interesting geeky experiment that would help me with some of the next potential projects.