JimAtwood

To me I am not so optimistic that the Japanese will turn to .mobi websites. You don't have to look far in "Japanese only" websites not run by foreign expats or "maniac" tech enthusiasts to see that mainstream sites are not on the .mobi domain yet. Most companies go for the .co.jp domain because it has the highest quality and brand image in Japan. The .jp domain is secondary and much cheaper without all the red tape required for .co.jp domains. There is also a .net.jp domain too. When you factor in the .com and .net domains, it quickly becomes crowded for the Japanese to determine what would be the best domain to put a mobile site on.

Happie Nuts Japan has released their Summer Trend Special issue for September 2009. The cover is pretty good but I'm looking forward to Happie Nuts spotlighting other gals in the near future. This I notice is a trend happening lately with Japanese Gal magazines. Once they find a popular gal, they tend to run with her on almost every cover. I know why they do this because it does attract and influence Japanese gals to buy the magazine. However, there are A LOT of nice fashion gals available for cover shoots and I think these magazines should take more risks. In a bad economy though, perhaps that is not such a good idea for conservative based management. Nonetheless, Happie Nuts has a nice issue on their hands this month and it's worth checking out. I also think Happie Nuts and Jelly are finding it hard to differentiate themselves. They are both released on the same day and they both have the same style of cover. Although many gals may understand the differences, at first glance I generally think they are more similar than different. Just my thoughts. Attached is the Cover, Back, and table of contents for the September 2009 issue of Happie Nuts Japan. I like the Back Jerry Girl ad which is cool too. Enjoy!

This past week I've been researching mobile solutions for my new jimatwood.mobi [jimatwood.mobi] domain. I found two popular solutions of which one worked very well for me. The first idea was to go with mobify.com. I tried out their website development tools and either I'm just not getting it or I'm too much of a programmer to wrap my head around it. I just found mobify too time consuming to get my site working in basic mobile fashion. I then took a week off and then later after some additional research stumbled upon the dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack which was recently released. Today I installed Wordpress 2.8.2 on jimatwood.mobi and then installed the dotMobi WordPress Mobile Pack 1.1.1 plugin. After about 30 minutes of painless installation, I had a complete working mobile site up and running rather quickly.

A collection of photographs that fall under the theme category of "green" here in Nagano City, Japan. One of the things I often do in photography is to shoot with a specific theme in mind. This could be a color, object, motion, texture, etc. I find shooting for specific colors to be a joy and especially in collecting the photographs over time. Most of the photographs taken in this collection were photographed sometime in the summer or late Spring. I hope you enjoy they slideshow as much as I have enjoyed photographing the scenes within. By the way, "Midori" means "Green" in Japanese. "A Midori Summer in Japan" is by Jim Atwood Photography at jimatwood.net.

With regards to the VodPod theme, I'm not sure what is happening. I have test around other sites using JQuery and Fancybox and they all have given me problems ( including other sites using VodPod) which suggests it may not be a Vodpod theme problem, but rather a compatibility issue with Jquery and IE8 itself. The Fancybox forums over on Google even suggests the same. Currently I've opted to just tell people to view my site with Firefox for best performance until Fancybox provides an update or I code something else.

Nagano by Day is a collection of photographys by popular Nagano Japan Pro Photographer Jim Atwood at jimatwoodphotography.com [jimatwoodphotography.com] . The photos depict a day on the streets in Nagano City on June 27th, 2009 with a Nikon Camera and Lens.

Kanji Japan is a photography collection of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji that make up the Japanese writing system. I find these writing characters to be an artform in itself and are a joy to photograph. Images were taken by Jim Atwood Photography at jimatwood.net [jimatwood.net] in Nagoya, Tokyo, Yokohama, and Nagano Japan.

Jim Atwood Photography Store sells popular photography artwork and T-shirts from Japan.