| Date |
Update |
| June 14, 2008 |
I completely rewrote the Gates page under the Structures menu. While working on this page I also added a dozen or more pictures throughout the site. Most of them were used for this gates page but not all. The next rewrite of a structures page will be Yagura sometime in July. |
| May 29, 2008 |
Added Kameyama Castle donated by Lynden C. I also added 2 more pictures to Komoro Castle from Benjamin C., 1 picture from Castles of Kyushu for the Castle Towns page and one picture each from my own files to the Castle Towns and Samurai Homes pages.
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| May 23, 2008 |
I completely rewrote the page about castle donjon. This is also the first time that I used Google Sketchup. I hope it worked to help illustrate the different types. I'm going to gradually rewrite all the structure pages in the same way. If you have any requests for what to do next or suggestions for more improvement please let me know. |
| April 29, 2008 |
I added Komoro Castle with pictures donated by Benjamin C. and Nakagusuku Castle and Katsuren Castle donated by Terry P. These old "gusuku" castle ruins in Okinawa are incredible. I'd love to visit some of them one day. |
| April 26, 2008 |
I added Ueda Castle with pictures donated by Frederik L. and Benjamin C. I also enhanced the page on Castle Towns with pictures from other castles and added a new page for Samurai Homes with pictures from Kakunodate and Sakura. Finally, I also enhanced the castle profile pages to automatically display any original structures that are designated Important Cultural Property from the Historical Artifacts page. |
| April 13, 2008 |
I visited the first new castle of 2008, Sakura Castle in Chiba Pref. It's only ruins, but it's one of the Top 100, there are many dry moats, a nice museum and some original samurai homes nearby.
I have also been slowly making several technical updates over the last month. The program that runs the Castle Selector and the Castles Map are now entirely done in Ruby running off the database rather the old Perl script and manually updated index. In the profile of each castle all the relevant categories also link to similar castles in the Castle selector. The data on the home page is updated automatically and finally all the Google Maps now run off YM4R, a Ruby library for mapping. |
| February 03, 2008 |
I Added a new Resources page called Library. This is a list of all the castle related books in my collection. Using the LibraryThing tools, this list also gives a picture of the book cover and the list itself will automatically update each time I register a new book in my personal library on Librarything. I only have one English book, but I listed some others too for people who want English books. I also switched the RSS feed to one managed by Feedburner. If you are using the RSS feed to watch for updates I recommend switching to this one instead: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Jcastle. I also changed the RSS feed to include an image with the top entry. If you prefer email, you can
subscribe to email announcements to have information about the new content automatically sent to your email too. |
| January 12, 2008 |
I added several new pictures for Kofu Castle which I revisited on my recent trip to the Lake Suwa area, some new pictures for Kumamoto Castle donated by Kenji Yamamoto, and I newly added Iwasaki Castle donated by Guillaume H. I also made several technical updates to the site. I added a new commenting system. At the bottom of each castle profile page, you can leave your own comment about the castle. Feel free to write anything about visiting it, more history information, or even a good cafe or hiking trail nearby that would be useful to someone visiting the castle. Finally, I changed the default map type to "terrain", a new Google Map type. One advantage is that Terrain has some place names in English which the other map types do not. I also improved how the little maps on each profile page work and the zoomed in larger map from the castle profile. |
| December 29, 2007 |
I added Takashima Castle, Uehara Castle and Kuwabara Castle from a recent trip to the Suwa area. I also took some new pictures of Kofu Castle I'll put up in a few days and I have some donations to get caught up on too. |
| October 07, 2007 |
I added Akashi Castle and Yoshida Castle donated by Rad Deverala. |
