A Kanjicom makeover was long overdue. The results are not spectacular, but pleasing, I think. I use XML1 and XHTML1.1 for the basic structure and CSS2 to dress it up. Thanks to help from a fourteen-year old whizkid, some XLS transformations and perl-based includes are also employed.
I write all content and markup with the jEdit4.3pre2 editor on Debian Linux. Hopefully, a very stable and speedy jEdit4.3 will be released someday soon, although from the end user perspective development seems to have slowed almost to a stop for half a year or more. A shame, because jEdit is a superb editor. Emacs still doesn't handle Unicode easily, makes the use of IMEs on Gnome difficult, and I still have trouble getting fonts to look nice. Vim is an attractive option. It runs fast, seems to be under rigorous development, and appears to have the requisite external endowments for my Web site work. But I couldn't get productive with it fast enough. If I could devote a month to learning VIM, I may switch to it from Java-based jEdit. (I know. My month would be the equivalent of three days for a young whippersnapper. Sigh.) Then, maybe not. I have become addicted to the brackets in the gutter that graphically map out the scope of an element in jEdit. Bluefish doesn't allow split screens but does allow multiple instances so you can fake split screens, sort of. But I've had problems with regular expressions in the search and replace function. Gedit doesn't allow split screens OR multiple instances, so for me, it's impossible to work on a bunch of Web pages at once with that. The GUIs of Nvu and Quanta Plus are too heavy for my taste. Screem looks very promising. Alas, as a non-programmer, I was not able to work my way through the dependencies labyrinth to compile the latest versions to see how it is progressing. So, in spite of problems with very slow scrolling, I have been using jEdit 4.3pre2 under Sun's Java2 1.5 jre. Of course, I use the Gimp 2.2 for graphics, and Inkscape 0.42 for the SVG version of the site which will be launched "real soon now".
Along with a change in appearance comes a refreshing (at least for me) on-going content update. The first thing that some of you will notice is that the list of kanji and kanji expressions for tattoos is gone. I had never intended to get involved in translating words and ideas from English into kanji, especially into kanji that could be more or less understood by educated readers from all parts of the kanji realm --- Taiwan, the Chinese mainland, Japan, Korea, Singapore and overseas Chinese communities throughout the world.
If someone is foolhearty enough to want to produce kanji for tattoos, I suggest they take out an ad on my products page. Other than that, Kanjicom will no longer be a resource for kanji for tattoos, I'm afraid. Which is kind of a shame. I enjoyed my contact with a wide range of people whose interest in kanji was focused on getting kanji permanently inscribed on their ass, or other body surface. It was fun while it lasted. And it was something I certainly never anticipated when I started Kanjicom in 1995. (Time permitting, I will still be happy to explain or translate the kanji in existing or proposed tattoos if I am sent a clear picture of the kanji in a graphics file.)
10/18/05 Permanent link