Nipponica

As I am sitting in the ANA Lounge in Haneda, let’s look back over the past week. Nipponica started publishing last weekend so let’s debrief on how the first seven days has gone for my new baby.

My initial goal at this very early stage was just to get in the habit of publishing a reasonable number of link posts each day and to figure out the best workflow for getting that to happen with the least amount of friction. I think I have succeeded in accomplishing point 1 (62 link posts in total) and am continuing to work on point 2.

So far, I am reading and collecting stories from only a few main sources: The Mainichi, Japan Times, and Nikkei. This is due to these three being the only main news outlets with English language RSS feeds that I can ingest into my RSS client (Reeder, if you are interested). There are other English sources available from other Japanese publishers but no RSS which makes me sad.

While it would be great to find a way to bring those other non-RSS English news feeds into my workflow, I do not see this as a priority at the moment. Japan’s language is Japanese, and that is where the biggest trove of interesting news lies.

So the next big goal in the growth of Nipponica is finding ways of bringing news written in Japanese to an English audience. I have a few tricks that I can pull to make this work efficiently for a team of one (i.e. me) and that will be my goal for the next weeks.

One other project that I launched over the past few days is an automated bot that posts stories to Mastodon at our handle @nipponica@mastodon.social. There was a bumpy patch over the first night as two stories were repeatedly posted over and over every 15 minutes, but I think it has been worked out now after a long debugging session at an Akihabara coffee establishment (sorry). Mastodon integration was my first social media goal and I am interested in expanding posting to other networks when I have the time.

For those of you who randomly found Nipponica during this first week, thank you for being the web spelunkers that you are and looking at this work-in-progress. I am really enjoying the process of building out the site and I hope that reading it brings you some amount of value. My flight home is soon, off to the gate.