Japanese Blog Aggregator is up and running (with some thoughts)

Well, I officially got it running last wednesday but wanted to watch to make sure there were no strange things going on like the last problem I was having with posts coming in each time the server would go out and get the contents of the blog. I actually solved that by comparing the link of the blog entry instead of comparing the titles of the blog entries like the original MXNA code does. My CF was a little rusty (read: not good at all) before this project, but I think I've improved my own skills a lot by changing things up and making it work and look better to accomodate different character sets. The one thing I really like about CF is that it is quite intuitive and since I already have an asp background (vbscript) with quite a bit of DB experience under my belt, it's easy to catch on to. I still have to get the FAQ and ABOUT section done, but there is a short explanation on the forum so it'll do for the week I think.

On a different note, I wanted to bring up a point that Alex did in my last entry's comments area of the situation of blogs and getting information in Japan and Japanese. I have found that at this time there aren't a lot of Japanese people who write blogs on web related technical issues. Why? Well I think there are a few reasons. The biggest one is that it just hasn't caught on yet. Almost all the blogs in Japan (that I have seen) are literally just an online diary of that person's life. More personal things, and much less "information". There are of course exceptions. The next reason comes in a close second to the third in that most people probably don't find writing a blog worth it as either they don't know enough to write about certain things, or they know a lot and don't want to share their secrets or it could be that they think people will see them as a "know-it-all". It's a different mentality here and kind of hard to explain, but I think within a year or so the amount of web related blogs will increase quite a bit. As long as there is a way for them to get their thoughts out to a wider audience (hence aggregators) and they realize that the increased attention is actually quite beneficial to them.

On a more personal note. The people I have talked in chat or mail, usually say they just have nothing to say to the world. Though they do have ideas and are constantly improving their skills, they're just not the sort to go about blaring it out on a blog. Another reason is that they think if they put some good code up, or some ideas that they have, they'll lose the edge they think they have and start losing work to people who take that knowledge and do more with it than they do. I think we were all like that at some point maybe, (or of that sort) but once we saw the usefulness or just wanted to be a piece of the community, we hopped on the blog bandwagon and hooked up with some aggregators. Person by person, day by day the community can only grow I think :)