I know I don't exactly do much with this site anymore, but I did recently make some small changes.
Primarily, I've reorganized some of the outdated content (like the stuff related to Channel 9) so it's less prominent. I've also updated the information for Ookii.Dialogs to link to the forked project on GitHub. My own version isn't kept up to date, so most people looking for Ookii.Dialogs should probably be using that version instead (the people who are doing this are awesome, by the way, for keeping this project alive).
Oh, and the site now supports https, thanks to Azure's free SSL/TLS certificates.
Ookii.org now has a new home! It's the same site as always, except now it's hosted on Microsoft Azure. This shouldn't make any difference for you, and it probably won't mean this blog will get any more active, but all the existing content is still there.
Due to the very large volume of spam comments this site receives despite efforts on my part to block them (recaptcha is apparently completely useless), I'm unfortunately forced to disable comments on all posts on this site.
If you wish to contact me about anything pertaining to this site, please use Twitter instead.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
As you can see, Ookii.org has gotten a revamp. Now you may wonder, why make such a radical update to a site when the content doesn't change that often? The main reason is that I wanted to get my hands dirty with some modern web technology.
While web development has never been particularly important to me, it was something I knew how to do and I kept somewhat up-to-date with. This dates back to making the site for my high school (at the time in Frontpage). However, as I'd been busy with my Ph.D. in Japan, I had very little time to keep up to date with stuff I didn't have any need to use in my research. Now that I've finished and haven't started my new job yet, it was the ideal time to brush up a little.
Back when I started this site, I wrote it in ASP.NET 2.0. I hand-rolled an AJAX library, because jQuery was years from being invented and actually AJAX support in websites wasn't all that common yet. The AJAX parts of the site used web services that returned data in XML, because no one had thought to start using JSON yet either. "Mobile browsers" at the time meant IE for Windows Mobile, which didn't support script at all and was barely on par with IE6 on the desktop otherwise. And speaking of IE6, supporting that was still very much a priority at the time.
But things have changed, and the goal was to re-familiarize myself with the state of the art. So this site is written in ASP.NET MVC 4, using the Entity Framework for data access. On the client, it uses HTML5 and CSS3, with scripts utilizing jQuery and a few related libraries. The site now has a responsive layout thanks to Zurb Foundation (try it: resize your browser window and watch the layout change), which has the side-effect of making it much more friendly for mobile devices. I've also used Knockout.
I have to say I was surprised at how much web programming has changed. ASP.NET MVC is light-years beyond the old web forms. Not only are the frameworks much better and the HTML/CSS much cleaner (at least, as long as you only target modern browsers), the tooling (in the form of Visual Studio 2012 in my case) also has improved tremendously.
Besides just redesigning the layout, I've also made a new front page that de-emphasizes the blog a little (since I don't update it that often), and instead provides a few more useful links as well as news about my Let's Plays from the associated Twitter account.
Note that not everything uses the new layout. Currently, only the blog has been updated. I intend to move other sections of the site to the new layout over time.
Let me know what you think, or if you find something that's broken.
I've made a few small changes to the site today.
The most obvious one is the picture in the header (if you're still seeing the old one, refresh the page). The old picture was a satellite image of Leiden, which hasn't been really appropriate for about five months now, but I couldn't decide on what to replace it with. A similar satellite image of Tokyo might've been nice but the old one had a nice uniform colour scheme on account of all the roofs in the Netherlands being the same colour. Tokyo is more varied in roof colour, which makes it very hard to put legible text over the image. In the end I decided on this image of the Shinkyo sacred bridge from Nikko.
The other changes are less noticeable. For one thing, my own comments are now highlighted, making it easier to see when I've replied to one of your comments. I've also added links at the bottom of the main page to page through the post archive. The category pages, which previously would show all posts in a category which led to huge pages, now show only five posts and use this same paging mechanism. Similarly, on the page for an individual post, links at the top lead to the previous and next post. This should make the blog somewhat easier to navigate.
I've also changed it so a post with images attached shows at most five thumbnails in the post display. Any further images are simply indicated by the text "N more images". This should decrease loading time for posts with lots of images, and should reduce my bandwidth usage.
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