JapanSoc has undergone another round of updates. Here are the most interesting changes:
Tags are back
Tags have always been used in JapanSoc for search results, but for presentation reasons they were hidden from view earlier this year. Now they are back as a small tag icon next to the category on story pages. Clicking that icon will reveal the tags, and clicking a tag gives you a page of search results for that tag.
Improved relevance in related links
It’s always a bit frustrating to see relevant stories not included in the list of related links on either a story page or the final stage of story submission. I’ve made some changes to improve the accuracy of the links and I’m quite impressed with the results. Here’s a before and after shot of Shibuya’s Samurai Underwear story:
Incidentally, although only 10 are shown in this example, up to 20 related links are now shown on story pages, and 15 on story submission step 3.
Story titles must be original
I’m always pulling my hair out when people submit stories with the exact same title as the original, plus the blog name. In the first screenshot above, you’ll see this hideously long title:
Japan’s birthrate up for third straight year in 2008 as population decline continues Japan Economy News & Blog – Business, Economy, Real Estate, Marketing and Economic Reports
The reason this happens is because JapanSoc automatically fills in the submission form with the original title, but it does that so you can conveniently edit it, not leave it as it is. If you don’t change it, there’s a very good chance that the JapanSoc link will rank higher in Google than the original story, which isn’t very fair to that blogger. E.g.
I’ve now added a check to see if the titles match, and if they do, you have to go back and change it to something different. On the error page, I give this example:
…if the original title is New Kimura Takuya Movie, you could change it to Kimu-Taku Stars in New Film.
Of course, there’s always the chance that someone will change just one character, or even worse, remove the original blog name from the title, which would make this example: “Japanese Newspaper Headlines < JapanSoc” 
Major bug fix
This last one’s hard to explain, but there was a nasty bug that once in a while caused duplicate stories, stories that didn’t exist, or stories that linked to different stories! It only affected about 1 in 50 submissions, but I tracked it back to a tricky character encoding issue caused by Japanese fonts. I’m very happy to say that bug has now been fixed… touch wood.
I’m chuffed to bits with the progress I’ve been making on JapanSoc lately. If you haven’t seen all the new features, click back a few posts and catch up!
