"A Healthy Disregard For The Impossible!" And Thanks For Your Support

I've been feeling a little depressed lately.

When others look down on what you are doing it can really shake your confidence, especially when it is a family member. I'm suffering such an attack on my confidence. My father thinks that Nipponster is a waste of time. And I almost succumbed to his opinion (posting less, webmonkeying less, and brainstorming less with Keitaro and James) but recently we got some really great feedback that perked me up again.

We appreciate all feedback (please give us feedback!!) good, bad or ugly. Actually, especially ugly as that helps us improve.

That said, I suppose that there are few greater pleasures for a webmaster than to receive this kind of positive feedback:

"It's been a while since I've last contacted you, but since I haven't exactly had
a chance to explore the full capacities of Nipponster, it would have been without
use anyway. Recently, researching materials fora biography about Abe Kobo, I
found Nipponster very useful. Websites not even displayed when searched for at
Google or other engines, popped upfirst or second at Nipponster, with useful
information to boot. I guess my point is, a job well done, and keep up the good
work. I'll do my share by getting Nipponster acquainted with as many people as
possible.

Sincerely yours,

Naikou, aka Christian"

This kind of completely unsolicited feedback excites me and I am glad that I have helped to create something useful. And I am also flattered that he put a link to Nipponster on his blog that reads "What I deem necessary." Wow my head just grew two sizes :)

Here is another one, a review that another blogger gave us:

Just added the Nipponster - Japan
enthusiasts search engine search box to the site. It's basically google for
Japanese web sites. Under the search box is a recent searches cloud for
something random if your bored. They have a blog which has loads of interesting info about their site, links, searches ect. Also worth a donwload is their own tool bar, which has loads of cool links pre-installed such as live streaming tv and radio, blogs,
lessons an loads of other Japanese related stuff. So check out Nipponster it's perfect for Japanese freaks and geeks!

http://j-culture.blogspot.com/2007/04/nipponster.html

Again, head growing. But back to reality, the fact that there are a bunch of projects yet less than half finished and A LOT of promotion still to do ought to shrink my melon back down to size :)

Thank you guys and the others of you out their who have been so supportive! You are what keeps us going!

And now, revitalised, it is time to DREAM...

It is time for "A Healthy Disregard For The Impossible!"

If case you haven't heard, Nipponster is dedicated to better organising and enhancing ALL of the Japan-related information on the web.


That statement may sound ridiculous to some, and even more ridiculous when they hear that there are currently only three of us running Nipponster.

But I don't care if it is ridiculous. And I don't care if people think we are stupid or foolish.

Like Don Quixote (the literary character not the Japanese chain store :) we are chasing the impossible dream!

And now for a lesson from Larry Page:

“Google was started when Sergey and I were Ph.D students at Standford University in computer science,” Page began to explain, “and we did not actually know what we wanted to do. I got this crazy idea that I was going to download the entire Web onto my computer. I told my advisor that it would only take a week. After a year or so, I had some portion of it.” The students laughed.
“So optimism is important,” he went on. “You have to be little silly about the goals you are going to set. There is a phrase I learned at college called, ‘Having a healthy disregard for the impossible’” Page said. “That is a really good phrase. You should try to do things that most people would not.” - THE GOOGLE STORY by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed

And so we will trek on, doing the things most people would not...
Taking on the enormous challenge of "making the web a better place for Japan-enthusiasts"

-TOrI

Back In Action

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh (exhale)


Things have been so busy lately. I bet you can relate.
It seems like everyone is busy having to do something they would rather not if they could.

And those of you who can do what you enjoy doing all of the time... please be quiet :P

James and Keitaro and I all work regular jobs, so Nipponster gets our part-time attention at best.
I wish that I could give it more...
It is the kind of work that I would GLADLY do for free.

Luckily things have finally quieted down a bit for me and I have some much needed time to work on the mission.

SO,
I would like to hear from you:

What do you like/dislike about Nipponster?

What improvements would you like to see?

I am at your service,
-Tori

Blonde Moment

Tori had a "blonde moment" today and accidentally pointed the "what's new?" link (on the frontpage of Nipponster.com) to Nipponster.com (THE FRONT PAGE)!!

:)


Our resident airhead...
hehehe. Tori will be hearing about that one for awhile.

-Kei

We were down this morning

I woke up this morning to find that Niponster was suspended...

Can you imagine my surprise?
And then, to my no small mortification, I opened my email account and found the following from our webhost:

"Hello,
We are emailing you to inform you that your account is suspended due
to AUP/TOS violation. We received a notification from our upstream provider that
your website was involved in using a trademarked name and pictures to
fraudulently gain logins and passwords to accounts. As per our TOS, we have
suspended your website."

About now I am gulping hard and wondering what in the world could have happened. I know that I haven't done anything, but I gather from the email that they are accusing me of phishing. How can that be?

We had had a problem with crackers before on another website so my mind immediately raced back to that experience. I thought, "It must be the work of crackers. Somehow they have hacked into my site and planted their phishing page."

I will save you a long read and let you know that that is what it was and that the situation was all resolved by this afternoon and everything is back to normal.

I would write more about it, for those of you that have websites that might be similarly targeted but I don't want to bore the rest of the readers. If you want to know more about how I corrected the problem please contact me and you can also find out about how phishers are hijacking websites in this article (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39202003,00.htm )

-Tori

A change of lipstick

We made a few (as we see it) humourous changes to the homepage today.

"Shake things up a bit" we thought.



Put on some new "lipstick" as it were.



Doesn't she look beautiful?



-James







p.s. Yes, we are just stalling because we are behind with our updates and the new hot search archive. There! Are you happy now?! ^^;