Posted:Jun 16, 2007

Improvements

A couple of bits of news from the past week and a half.

We have added “comments” to the news posts, so please let us know what you think of it all.

We have improved the listings of the venues. Inside the Venue
Type
lists the venues are now organised by areas, and inside the
Venue Areas lists the venues are organised by venue type.
Finally, inside those sub-categories, the venues are alphabetically
listed in the English version, and this order is also the one set for the Japanese listings.

You will have noticed that our site search provided by Google has now harvested the data from our site. This is what will have to make-do with for now. In the next few months we will look into installing a more precise and customizable search engine.

RSS feeds have now been reoganised. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, or want to see the full list of feeds we offer on our site, have a look at our FAQ.
All the events lists have a RSS feed that publishes the relevant events once only: when they are published on the website for the first time. In the case of the Smart Lists (the blue lists), the Just Started list publishes an event once only, on the day it starts; the Coming Soon list published the event once only when it is 6 days from starting. Finally, the popular Last Few Days list publishes an event 3 times: once when it reaches its Last Week, then once when it Closes Tomorrow and then again on its last day. This has been tested for a week now and even during an event intensive week like now, the feeds have proven very flexible and useful.

And finally, we reworked the way the site displays in Japanese and English. Now when you click on your prefered language at the top right of the window, all the pages you subsequently navigate to will stay in your chosen language. Change the language again and you’ll be able to navigate in the other language. The good news is that the site’s URLs still stay the same for both languages; for example you can send a page that you are viewing in Japanese to your American friend in NY and it will display in English on his computer. The language chosen by default when you first connect to the site depends on your browser language settings.

So, what do you think?

Paul Baron

Paul Baron

Born in 1977 in Paris. After graduating in 2002 from the London College of Communication, he moved to Tokyo to taste Japan's powerful visual culture. He worked for 3 years at Honda R&D as an interaction designer and in 2004 launched Tokyo Art Beat with Olivier and Kosuke.