Akatombo Web Log
Sunday, October 10, 2004
CEATEC JAPAN 2004 Wraps Up
CEATEC JAPAN 2004 has come to an end for another year. Once again it was an interesting and challenging project, and we would like to thank everyone involved. This year's CEATEC had to be finished early due to the arrival of a typhoon, so it closed on the last day at 1:00 rather than the planned 5:00. We hope that you weren't one of the unlucky souls who showed up for CEATEC only to find it was closed. We will give a more detailed writeup soon, but until then lets just say that we were generally satisfied this year, but still feel we have a long way to go. We were able to create a functional and automated flash map, and increase the use of web standards, though we are still far from a standards compliant site. We plan to make the case for full standards compliance prior to starting next year's website. Wish us luck!Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Spread Firefox
Some of you may have noticed the Get Firefox banner in the sidebar on the top page of this site. Firefox is such a superior browser to Internet Explorer that we are participating in the Spread Firefox campaign to try to spread Firefox to new users. The campaign has had good results, even in our webstats the use of Firefox is on the rise which is a good thing for the Internet. I posted a short article over on the Spread Firefox site about how making it easier for people to participate would enhance the spread of Firefox. Go have a look, and let me know what you think.
Thursday, September 09, 2004
Japanese site launched, new CMS
We are pleased to announce the long in coming launch of our Japanese pages. It is short of articles at the moment, but that is something that we hope to remedy in the very near future. While we were at it, we updated the site to a new content management system that will give us more flexibility, and hopefully let us do some really cool stuff in the near future.
We have done our best to make sure that our url are consistent, so if you are reading the Design Page (http://www.akatombo.com/index/en/design/) and decide that you want to read the Japanese version of the page, simply change the en in the url to a ja (http://www.akatombo.com/index/ja/design/) This should work (I think) for any url on the site, but when you do it for pages containing articles from the news section the navigation, date header, etc languages will change while the article itself stays the same.
It is likely that in spite of all our checking we have missed some errors, so if you see something that seems strange to you, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
We have tried to make sure that our new site layout won’t break anything, and so we have redirected all of the old url to their new counterparts. Big thanks to Natalia for pointing out that images weren’t showing up on one of the pages. This was due to a minor error in our redirection code, and was fixed in seconds. Without her letting us know though, it may have been there for days. Thanks Natalia!
If you are subscribed to our RSS feed, and it suddenly stops working correctly in your reader, please tell us, we have redirected our old feed to our new RSS 2.0 feed, and while we don’t think it’ll break anything we can’t be totally sure.
And last, but not least, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the site. Do you find the color scheme to be hard on your eyes? Do you think it would be better if our side menu was on the right side? Whatever your suggestion, please tell us about it. If you are going to leave a comment in the news section, we highly recommend that you sign up as a site member. This will make it easy for you to post comments, just type the comment and go, no need to enter any of your other information each time. The member sign up can be found in the upper left-hand corner of any news section page.
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Maintenance
We are currently performing some site maintenance tasks we’ve been putting off for quite a while. the largest of these is changing the backend that runs all dynamic aspects of the site. We’ll try to keep interruptions to a minimum, and hopefully you won’t notice the changeover at all, but if you do notice anything strange, please contact us.
Monday, August 30, 2004
Dog Helmet Customer Gallery added
We have added a customer gallery to the Dog Helmets section of the site so that you can see our helmets in use. These photos have been submitted by satisfied customers, and we greatly appreciate them spending the time to take the photos and send them to us. Our initial round of thanks go to Earl and Mack, but there should be more photos coming in soon, so keep checking back.
All of our customers to date have been very satisfied, and we plan to keep it that way. If you think there is some way that we can provide better service, please don’t hesitate to let us know. If you have one of our helmets and can think of a way that it could be improved, we’ll pass it on to the manufacturer. If they use your suggestion to improve their product, we’ll either send you the new helmet free of charge, or offer it to you below cost, depending on what kind of arrangement we can work out with the manufacturer.