Jcastle.info

Guide to Japanese Castles

Site Updates

 

Date Update
January 02, 2010 Jcastle.info Year in Review

This has been an incredible year for visiting castles and adding content to this site. Three overnight trips and a couple day trips combined to give me 21 castle visits this year, 17 of them were first time visits. In order, I visited...

  1. Takato Castle
  2. Matsumoto Castle
  3. Ueda Castle
  4. Takiyama Castle
  5. Otaki Castle
  6. Chiba Castle
  7. Iwatsuki Castle
  8. Ishigakiyama Castle
  9. Odawara Castle
  10. Yokosuka Castle
  11. Kakegawa Castle
  1. Takane Castle
  2. Nagashino Castle
  3. Yoshida Castle
  4. Ansho Castle
  5. Nishio Castle
  6. Fukuyama Castle
  7. Okayama Castle
  8. Akashi Castle
  9. Takeda Castle
  10. Himeji Castle
I also had the pleasure of adding 9 new locations donated by readers and a dozen or so new pictures to enhance existing castle pages.
  1. Yamato Koriyama Castle
  2. Kikuchi Castle
  3. Ako Castle
  4. Fukushiyama Castle
  5. Tottori Castle
  6. Saga Castle
  7. Kushima Castle
  8. Akizuki Castle
  9. Tsuyama

Besides castles, I added some new Structures pages for Wooden/clay walls, Roofs & Gables, and a short article about the castle architect Todo Takatora.

In between the content updates, I found some time to work on the technical aspects of this site too.

  • All of my pictures taken since May 2009 are tagged with GPS coordinates and you'll find a little map in the upper right of each page photo page pointing out the location for any picture with GPS coordinates. If you click the marker you'll get a bigger map of all the pictures for that castle marked on a map.
  • Changed the Castle Browser faceted search system from Solr to ThinkingSphinx.
  • Created a Photo Browser tool that works like the Castle Browser making use of the tags that I've been using to catalog pictures for the last year or so. I still have about 400 old pictures to catalog, but I'll get to them this year.
  • Added a GeoRSS feed as requested by a frequent reader.

In 10 years of working on this site, 2009 was by far the most content rich. It will be hard to equal that again, but we'll see what 2010 brings.