See Japan's castles the easy way

I’ve been a very busy boy

Article posted on Monday, January, 23rd, 2012 at 8:21 pm


Hello RSS subscribers & regular/semi-regular dropper byers. It has been a while, hasn’t it? The first thing you should know is that I’ve been slaving away for the last month to bring you the best Japanese Castle Explorer that I possibly can. I’ve put together a list.

So, what’s new?

The main site (i.e. not this blog) has a completely new theme. Though the layout should look familiar, I assure you it is a very different animal under the hood. How might it be different, you ask?

Small screen friendly
All pages can now fold up or out depending on the screen size. There are actually three stepped sizes and you can see them all by manually resizing the browser. Give it a go: link


(Pictured: Matsushiro Castle Profile)

Province pages
These pages have been around for some time but now there’s a top page. Also though, I’ve added way more data. Check out Shinano Province.

Videos page
Now in one, convenient location: Castle videos

Galleries / Articles
Added a Castle roofs page.
Added a Namako walls page.
Re-added the Miscellaneous pictures page.
Re-added the Stone-throwing windows page.

Castle profiles
Hagi castle – updated pictures & information.
Tsuwano castle – updated pictures & information.

Boring stuff
There’s a privacy policy page
Updated to a newer version of Mootools.

Misc stats / milestones
Castle profiles: 146
Pictures: 1,044
Blog posts: 195
Main site pageviews: 220,000
Blog pageviews: 30,000

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Help with rating, please

Article posted on Saturday, July, 23rd, 2011 at 8:57 pm


This is not one of my usual posts where I attempt to entertain lightly. This time I’m looking for some advice.

Long story short, I’d like to add some sort of rating system to the next version of the website & am unsure about pretty much every aspect of it.

With this one, you can see there are five criteria:

Scale A castle’s immenseness. Length, width & height.
Buildings A bit complicated, but basically a high number of gates/towers gets a good score.
Earth/Stonework   Stone walls, earthen mounds, moats, ditches.
Accessibility Ease of getting to, i.e. nearness to major transport hubs. But, also good multi-lingual signage, pamphlets, etc…
Nearby P.O.I. Places Of Interest. Basically, the Castle-Town. Daimyo gardens, Samurai homes, temples, etc…

So, entering in the five values creates the radar graph, the key (the bottom five lines) & a rating in %. Clicking on the avatar will take you to a twitter/Google+ account, a blog, whatever. And yes, this all means different people could submit their scores.

If anyone has any ideas to make it better/easier to understand, I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment. Oh, the 94% belongs to Kumamoto castle, the other Sashiki castle.

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Update – Spring 2011

Article posted on Thursday, March, 10th, 2011 at 9:27 pm


An update! I think it goes without saying that of all the updates that have come and gone, this one is, without a doubt, the most recent.

What I mainly wanted to achieve with this update was the re-organisation of the castle profile pages. Before, where there had been just some quick facts about a particular castle, has now been greatly expanded. Augmenting these quick facts are some (hopefully) handy links – nearby castles and any relevant blog posts.

The small, square map has also been replaced with a much larger version. You’ll notice there are some very button-like buttons under the map. Their functions should be self-explanatory. Again, I hope they are handy.

But wait. There’s more!

… not really, actually. Mostly I’ve just moved things around, there is no all-new, awesome feature. But please, follow this link to the Japanese Castle Explorer and spend a few minutes having a look around. Perhaps you will see something new.

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Street view

Article posted on Tuesday, January, 4th, 2011 at 7:05 pm


Well, it’s official. I’ve gone bananas for Google maps’ Street-view. At this point in time, coverage is far from perfect but no doubt, as time rolls on it’ll get better & better.

Here’s a list of the available panoramas. The list is pretty much arranged from awesome to not-so-good. The first three (which are also in bold) are pretty special as you go move within the castle grounds. The pictures below the list show what you can expect.

Kishiwada Castle

Kumamoto Castle

Nijo Castle

The following screenshots are not from the dedicated castle panorama pages (above) but instead are from the main map.html page. You’ll notice a small, yellow dude in the top-left corner. All you need to do is click-and-drag him to the desired place on the map. And there you have it, you're in the scene. Exiting is a little tricky, there’s an X in the top-right you need to click.

Anyway, here are some examples. Who knows what else you might be able to find?

Kawagoe

Shuri Castle

Fukuchiyama Castle

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Putting Japanese castles on the map

Article posted on Thursday, December, 2nd, 2010 at 1:01 pm


Without a doubt, the most under-utilised feature of the JCE website is the map. It may well be the case that for some site visitors, it’s the only thing of interest, but as I go through the list of visitors & visited pages, it seems most don’t get to experience the Google-map goodness.

“Why would that be?” I found myself asking… myself. After a good ol’ think, it seemed that there were two things that might help.

  • Promote the map & its features even more.
  • Write a guide on how to get the most out of it.

By writing the following guide, perhaps I can kill two birds with one stone. And to all you pros out there, be sure to check out the advanced stuff. I feel certain you’ll come across something new.

The guide

There are just 12 gold castle icons. They represent castles whose main tower was built before 1868. Castles that have retained one or more of their original gates or turrets from before 1868.
A central tower exists but is a modern reproduction, most likely concrete. Castles where very little remains are represented by this dark icon. The castles range from having just stonework to just a signpost.

Moving around
Click & drag the map. It’s that simple. You could also make your way around the map by clicking on the icons, but that would be a drag.

Zooming in & out
There are several options here.

  • The mouse. Double-left-click to zoom in. Double-right-click to zoom out.
  • The mouse again. Use the scroll-wheel.
  • The left-side control panel. Click + or – to zoom in or out.

Overlays
There is a veritable treasure-trove o’ goodies to be had here. Literally, you are but a click away from a world of new images & information. The fact is that you WILL stumble-upon things new & interesting here. Just click on the appropriate overlay button from the left control panel.

Wikipedia Photos Videos

The 日本語 version
Naturally, the Japanese-language version replaces the English labels on the control panel & the information in the mini-castle-profile windows with that of Japanese. Also, information from the Japanese Wikipedia is used in the Wikipedia overlay. It all makes perfect sense really.

Searching
The final feature (which I’m sure no-one uses) is an absolute winner. It’s 100% Google’s and it works like a charm no matter what you throw at it. Towns, countries, temple names, English, 日本語, hotel names, brands, whatever can be typed in. Give it a go.

Oh, almost forgot. You can find it in the bottom-left corner. You wouldn’t want to have to search for that. :)

Advanced stuff

Roll those sleeves up, because it is here that I hand control of the map over to you. It may take a bit of getting used to, but the following information will allow you to create custom views of the map which you can then use to post in forums, on twitter or just bookmark them to peruse at a later time.

Passing values
Additional parameters can be added to the URL to alter the initial settings of the map itself. So, what exactly might that look like, Daniel? Like this of course:

Parameter Description Values
lat The starting latitude. 85.00000 (North) to -85.00000 (South)
lng The starting longitude. 180.00000 (East) to -180.000000 (West)
zoom The starting zoom level. 0 (zoomed right out) to 21 (zoomed right in)
type The starting map type. satellite, hybrid, normal, physical (default)
marker Corresponds to a specific castle. 0 (Kumamoto castle) to 128 (Yoshida castle)
view Filters records from the database. (A region) e.g. Shikoku, (a category) e.g. Original
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August 2010 Trip

Article posted on Friday, August, 27th, 2010 at 9:31 pm


Well, the Summer holidays are coming to an end. As much as I’d like them to last for ever, pretty sure that’s an impossibility. Perhaps for many of you it was business as usual, but luckily for me, I was able to sneak in a little traveling. Well, a lot of traveling actually. And just to give this post some focus, I won’t talk about the three weeks I spent back in Australia.

First stop was Odawara castle. As soon as I’d landed in Haneda airport I was on the phone to @Genshin, a fellow twitterer. And before I go any further, I need to thank him profusely for making the trip possible. We racked up many k’s in the @Genshin family car, and I repaid him by breaking the car’s antenna. Doh!

Roadtrip!
I now realise that I was a little too ambitious in the planning stage. And the plan was to head North from Odawara & see everything there was to see in Nagano Pref in under 2 days. Suffice to say, we didn’t quite see everything. We did see a lot & just to give you a small taste I recommend the following link: Views of Japan for some of @Genshin’s photographs.

The route we took, took us to:

Suffice to say, the above destinations & some places in between will feature heavily in posts over the following months. Stay tuned!

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Return of the king

Article posted on Sunday, May, 30th, 2010 at 9:06 am


Hurrah! Ye olde functionality hath returned! Perhaps I’m being a little over dramatic but after over a year on the back burner (and being completely forgotten about), a most handy feature has made its way back.

What the heck are you talking about?
Once upon a time, moving from a castle profile page to the map page was a bit different: the corresponding info window would open in addition to the map centering & zooming.

Check this out: the old way & the new & even older way.

This functionality was removed when the site was transferred to the www.japanese-castle-explorer.com domain. For some reason the hosting environment (?) seemed to mess around with some important variables within the programming, meaning going to a particular marker would direct each visitor to one of two possible results – which was and is completely unacceptable.

One more thing
You’ll notice in the attached picture that beneath the individual castle pictures in the castle name, a map link & two categories. The map link now incorporates the link-to-marker function. I’ve added the category links for visitors to not only get to the information they want more easily but also as a way for them (you guys) to get a better idea of what you will see in each category.

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Update – May 2010

Article posted on Monday, May, 17th, 2010 at 5:39 pm


Hello everyone. It has only just struck me that readers of this blog and/or subscribers to the RSS feed may well have been missing many of the updates that have occurred on the Japanese Castle Explorer site.

How can this be??

Good question. Here goes. Following an update, I spare no time informing my fellow twitterers & facebookers. Assuming that my job is done, I sit back & relax. Well, as I said, I now realize my folly.

So what’s new?

Good question. There’s a new top page on the JCE site. And, an old Japanese castle maps page. Also new (but a bit old) is this page of Japan’s top 100 castles.

Gotta go guys, but always remember, any & all question, comments, theories are welcome. Post a comment or email, or tweet, etc….

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