Note: I’m writing this at nearly 5am. It’s been a long night of upgrading the site and I know there are some loose ends. The FAQ and blog will be updated in due course, and any bugs you find (there are always some) will be eventually squashed. Oh, and I deleted all your profile bios by accident, sorry about that!

For occasions such as this JapanSoc overhaul, Deas from Rocking in Hakata has created this fantastic video logo for our favorite social bookmarking site. Watch, gasp, then download the high definition version for your own JapanSoc-related videos.

Incidentally, Deas made a very cool JapanSoc OS X widget and some great social bookmarking icons, too. Thanks, Deas!

Who’s behind the new JapanSoc.com?

Before I give you a run-down of the new features, let me give a big, big thank you to Chris Gaunt of Nihongo Notes and J-Pop Japan. Chris just happens to be a multi-talented web developer, who completely rewrote the JapanSoc template. That’s no easy task when you consider a typical Social Web CMS template weighs in at over 60 files. I can’t thank Chris enough for the work he’s put into the site over the last month, and I’ll be using his services again in the near future. Chris does a lot of freelance work, particularly for Wordpress and Ruby on Rails sites. He’s also a PHP wizard and can dazzle with CSS. Learn more about what Chris can do for your site on his LinkedIn profile.

The engine that powers JapanSoc is Social Web CMS, an open source project which I’ve become heavily involved this last year, developing over 20 modules and contributing to the SWCMS SVN. Together with Chris, we are quite a formidable team!

16 All New Features!

1. The Design

This is what JapanSoc.com now looks like:

2. The JapanSoc Community News bar

Click the bar at the top and it will drop down, showing you links to JapanSoc.org related sites and RSS feeds from the Community Blog and the Twitter #jsoc hashtag.

3. Drop down categories and new ones, too!

I’ve split the categories into a few very generic groups, and using the drop-down “Suckerfish” menu makes it easy for us to add more categories, not to mention them being much more accessible than before.

4. Easy Submit button

When you click on the new submit button, a little drop-down box opens where you can directly add the url you want to submit.

5. Enhanced sidebar comments

Not only is there a little avatar next to each comment, when you hover the mouse over the comments in the sidebar, a tooltip shows you the name of the commentator and the title of the post the comment was made on. Very handy!

6. Avatars have gone Gravatar

I ran a poll recently to find out whether you preferred to use Gravatar or upload your own avatar. The response was clearly in favor of Gravatar, so we’ve dropped the uploading feature altogether. That’s a good thing because it saves you from faffing around with avatars, it saves me from fixing bad uploads, and it gives the site more flexibility in how avatars are used.

7. Nice4Rice or an umeboshi?

I used to have a website called “Nice4Rice” which I customized to allow readers to get a free backlink by “giving rice” to my reviews. It was a lot of fun and I miss that site a bit. Fortunately, I kept hold of the original Nice4Rice rice bowls and have used them in comment ratings!

If you like a comment or agree with it, give the author some rice! If it left a bad taste in your mouth, an umeboshi would be more appropriate. Of course, this is just cosmetic and three umeboshi will still bury a comment.

8. Filter comments to your friends

You’ll see in that image above a small link that reads “Show friends’ comments only”. If you click that, all comments from people not on your friends list will temporarily be hidden. You can view them individually by clicking the show/hide link, or just click the “Show all comments” link to view them all again.

9. Filter stories to your friends

Why limit it to comments? On the top menu bar, logged in users will see a new page called “Friends”. Clicking that will filter all the latest stories to show only those from your friends.

10. HTML in comments

BBCode has been an option for a while now on JapanSoc, but very few people used it. I’m not really surprised because we’re all so used to Wordpress comments. With that in mind, we dropped BBCode (which has left a bit of mess) and now allow limited HTML tags in comments, just like Wordpress. Smilies can still be used, and I’ve added a link to Ken’s Evoticon site which opens in a new tab so you can copy and paste so zany Japanese emoticons, too!

11. Subscribe to comments

This is one of my favorite new features. Instead of just allowing the story submitter to subscribe to replies, now anyone who comments has the choice of getting reply notifications sent to their email box.

12. The Social Bar

This is the big one! Far and away the most significant addition to JapanSoc is the social bar. When you log in, you’ll see the social bar glued to the foot of your window, showing your own user stats and links to your inbox, profile and settings.

13. Send a Quick Message

In the Social Bar is a Quick Message icon which gives you an instant messaging form so you can send out to your friends. Whenever you send a message, your friend will be notified by email (unless they turn off email notification), and if you get a message, the inbox icon will light up to indicate you have mail. How very convenient!

14. View other users in the Social Bar

The best thing about the Social Bar is that when you click on somebody’s username or avatar, anywhere on the site, their user info will be loaded into your Social Bar with a spot of Ajax so you don’t even leave the page.

Clicking the avatar or name here will take you to their main profile, but you can also use this bar to add or remove the user from your friends list, send them a message, visit their homepage, their Twitter page, look at their JapanSoc favorites, see if they are currently online, or return to your own Social Bar stats.

15. New-look Profiles

We’ve decided to drop the MySpace style profile and keep things simpler, but more focused on getting you connected with the viewer.

As you can see, your own sites and social network profiles get loads of attention, as do your friends and fans who will appear in your Social Bar with just one click! These are the icons Deas came up with, and there are others for Lang-8, LinkedIn and iKnow! too.

16. Oyakata

The Top Users box in the sidebar has been fun to watch over the last year, but what happens when everyone’s a Yokozuna? JapanSoc Sumo no longer ends at Yokozuna. When you get 15,000 points, you’ll be moved to the Oyakata box, a sumo stable of fame! Hat tip to Jordan for the suggestion.

Wrap-up

That’s about all of the major changes, though there are many smaller ones, too! Remember, you have to be logged in to enjoy most of the new features, so if you haven’t registered yet, please do! Visit JapanSoc.com.

Winning Eleven is my greatest vice, and the only thing standing between me and a thousand hours lost to a new PlayStation is my wife. Will Mami give up her TV time to let me play games? Can I convince her that a new PlayStation will benefit Rikuto’s education? This is one item on my wishlist I might have to skip… unless I can sneak it into my office and plug it into my PC monitor…  hmmm….

Hat tip to Famitsu.com (Japanese) and Kotaku.com (English)

My latest creations are a sin bin for temporarily disabling users, a way to block repeat submissions of deleted stories, a module that builds an RSS feed for comments, and I’ve improved the original private messaging module with bulk message deletion, an outbox and email notification of new messages.

…and SimplePie, a brilliant RSS and Atom feed parser written in PHP. I used this to write the RSS Basic module for SWCMS and also to pull in and parse the Japan Blog Big RSS Feed on JapanSoc.

First of all, I have no idea when Bluehost will respond to my support ticket and change the nameservers. Normally you can do this yourself, but I need an “A” record set up for my own personal nameservers. Maybe they can do it within hours, maybe days. Second, it could take a further 72 hours before the domain names propagate across the internet, and then after that, I still have a lot of bug fixing to do which can’t be done until the domain names are pointing at the new IP address.

Other problems include database overlap, especially for JapanSoc. I really don’t want to shut the site down until the move is complete, but by leaving it running, it will become out of sync with the new database.

In other words, this whole changeover will be unpredictable and messy. Yay!

I’m closing the comments on all my blogs, and will put a notice on JapanSoc, requesting members hold off on submissions, comments and votes until this is all completed. Thanks for your patience.

I’ve studied the error logs and it appears that these errors are caused by slow MySQL queries to the database. Since most of the queries come from core files in Wordpress and SWCMS, the only reasonable explanation for these CPU exceeded errors is the volume of traffic my sites are getting. In September, that figure was 267,194 visits.

Time for an upgrade

Bluehost charge less than $7 a month to host all my websites on one of their shared servers, so I can’t really complain if their CPUs can’t handle the load. Instead, it’s time to pay for some real service, so I searched out the best hosting solution short of leasing an entire server: a Liquid Web Virtual Private Server.

I managed to find a discount coupon at Digital Point giving me $30/month off, and bringing the total cost down to $75/month after the initial $150 setup I chose to pay. That’s a fair whack over $7 a month at Bluehost, but I should be able to recoup the cost if I don’t have the downtime I’ve been getting.

As I type this, I’m waiting for the technicians to set it up for me, and then I’ll spend the next week or two moving my sites across. Until I’ve done that, I can’t say whether it will solve all the hosting problems I’ve had over the last year, but I’m quietly confident.

Stay tuned for updates. My sites will go offline for up to 72 hours when I point the domain names to the new server.

10. Word 2007

Perhaps not as high up the list as you’d expect, I use Word for writing school curriculum, and that’s about it. Maybe if there was an English language pack available for it, I might use it more often, because I really do love the new 2007 design.

9. Paint Shop Pro 8

This has been my first choice of paint program for years. I’ve dabbled with later versions, but I always go back to PSP 8, which I think is from 2003. The latest version is here.

8. Wamp

This is a more recent addition to my PC. It’s a full Apache, MySQL and phpMyAdmin package for developing websites offline. In other words, it turns your computer into its own server. Wamp has been a pleasure to use after first trying the overly sensitive EasyPHP.

7. EditPad Pro

Can you believe I used Windows Notepad since I got my first PC in 1998 until August 2008. Imagine how much time and stress I could have saved if I’d got EditPad Pro earlier. The differences between the two text editors are enormous, but I particularly like the tabbed windows and the color-coded text in EditPad Pro. If you hand code your websites, I recommend EditPad which is free, but even more so the paid “Pro” version.

6. Ace Text

I bought AceText as part of a set with EditPad Pro above. It’s hard to describe, but is like an extended, permanent clipboard. It’s insanely useful for pasting quick memos, reminders and links into, and its neverending and searchable clipboard is just so handy!

5. Excel 2007

I’m not big on spreadsheets, but I find Excel 2007 to be perfect for a things-to-do list and as a general “whiteboard”. I also record my web earnings and expenses, and make fancy little graphs so I can mull over my income trends.

4. Skype

I don’t have a huge list of contacts, mostly close friends and family, and a few J-Web buddies for good measure. It’s always on, and I find text chat is incredibly convenient for sending quick messages. Skype also lets my parents watch their grandson every few days, and vice versa.

3. Smart FTP

I had to pay for this one after the trial expired, but it was worth every penny. Smart FTP is a program that lets you transfer files between your computer and a server on the internet. It’s so smart, I often find myself using it for simple file management on my computer, instead of using Windows Explorer!

2. Windows Mail

I don’t think I’ve ever had a web-based email account. I know that Hotmail and GMail are incredibly popular, but I’m a traditionalist when it come to email, and Windows Mail is perfect for my needs. WM is the sequel to Outlook Express. It comes packaged with Windows Vista and has two huge advantages over its predecessor: First, it’s got excellent spam filters, and second, emails are stored as individual files, making them easy to move, copy and back up. Windows Mail is always open and ready to serve my 12 email accounts!

1. Firefox

I love Internet Explorer, but a couple of weeks of unexpected crashes last December forced me to switch to my backup browser, Firefox. I’ve been meaning to return to IE7 now that it’s all patched up, but since Firefox doesn’t do a bad job, it’s still currently the most used program on my PC.

It’s not that Firefox itself is great, it’s just that a web browser is essential for connecting me to a whole other set of web-based applications which would require a list of their own!

And the rest…

Some other programs that are worth mentioning are Boilsoft MOV Converter, which lets me convert video from my cell phone to more common formats; Hypercam for recording directly from my monitor (great for making tutorials); Twhirl, a program that brings Twitter to your desktop; and my most recent purchase, Flash Slideshow Maker.

I can vouch for every program I’ve talked about here, but don’t part with your money before you try the trial versions which most of them offer. Make sure they are right for you!

What programs do you use the most on your PC?

SWCMS is open source, meaning anybody can contribute to its development, and I’ve been busy doing just that. I’m not a professional developer by any means so I usually report bugs and suggest improvements. Recently, I’ve tried my hand at making modules (the equivalent of Wordpress plugins) and I’ve come up with two so far:

Smilies Module

The Smilies Module converts smiley text into little faces like this: . Smilies are an excellent way to inject some emotion into comments and the occasional is handy to show you’re being sarcastic and prevent any unintended arguments with other users.

RSS Basic Module

Although it started as a simple tool to display an RSS feed on a SWCMS site, the RSS Basic module has grown over successive versions into something quite powerful. The site’s administrator can import multiple feeds, manage them through a control panel and display them anywhere on a page. The best feature, however, is that users can embed an RSS feed into their SWCMS profiles, just as I have done on my JapanSoc profile.

The RSS Basic module really taught me a lot about SWCMS as I had to learn how to create an admin interface and work with the database. I’m hoping that I’ve mastered the basics of module making and will go on to make bigger and better things!

Let me add that I’m enjoying contributing to the open source project so other users can benefit from my modules rather than me selfishly developing for JapanSoc only.

A no-hassle changeover?

At least I did at first. The problem is, although they promise an easy transition from your current phone and internet setup, it’s really not that easy at all. They give you the impression that they will take care of everything for you, but they can’t. It’s still your responsibility to cancel your internet provider (in my case OCN) and your current internet setup (in my case NTT Flets Hikari). Plus, you have to deal with the sales rep, the engineer and the admin person, all of whom phone you at 30 minute intervals on numerous occasions – at least in my experience.

Twenty questions

They weren’t rude at all, but with so many questions about your current set up, including the direction of the room in which your second computer is based, it all gets a bit overwhelming, especially when they fire their list of technical questions at you in Japanese.

Since I also had to contact the phone line rental company in Osaka to confirm whether I could switch to Commufa or not, I found the the hassle was not worth the 1,000 yen monthly savings. Yes, that’s right, once you include the costs to continue using your current phone number and email address, you don’t save as much as you expect.

Enough already

In the end, after about eight phone conversations with Commufa, I decided not to follow through with the switch. If you find yourself tempted by monthly savings and promises of a hassle-free changeover, just remember that it might not be quite as easy as it first appears.

Update: The very next day, someone from Commufa drove all the way up from Nagoya (90 min. drive) and rang our doorbell. He said he knew nothing about my conversations with Commufa the previous day and he was “just in the area”. Anyway, I invited him in and after he looked at my current setup he talked me through everything I had doubts about – and even showed that I’d be saving closer to 4,000 yen a month. So, I’ve signed on the dotted line and now wait for a visit from the electrician.

The first entry into the contest is this video by Mike from Japan Is Doomed. Here’s Tony D. Puddlespuddle, Internet Expert…

Mike is urging everyone in the world to go to YouTube, rate this video 5 stars and subscribe to his channel. C’mon, do it for Tony!