Topics and Content Organization Things
I’ve added a couple of in-development organizational features to the site.
Topics
Content is now organized into “topics.” These are just like tags, but they can be localized to specific events or happenings — topics, in other words.
Here are some examples
Some topics are part of a hierarchy. In the above, Sales & Rankings is a top level topic. containing all sales and ranking related stories that appear on the site It’s what one would normally call a tag. Weekly Ranking (8/13) is a local level topic containing just sales stories for the week of August 13. It currently has just two items, but there will be a few more stories when Dengeki releases its rankings and when Media Create shares shipment percentages later in the week. All stories under a local level topic also appear in the higher level topic.
You can think of a local level topic as like a thread you’d see on a message board. Most message boards will have a single thread for all the ranking stories covering the week of August 13, rather than individual threads for the individual stories or a single mega thread covering all sales and ranking stories ever.
This topic system is part of a central organization system that will hopefully be in place over the coming weeks.
You may have noticed that I also resurrected “Flying Get.” For newer readers, Flying Get is an old column I used to do where I’d assemble all the weekly magazine leaks in one story, updated throughout the day (here’s an example). I’ve since switched to separate stories, which is easier to follow (although, admittedly, not as “fun”). The new Flying Get is a topic that gathers all the flying get stories for the week. This includes stories that I write, and links to Japanese stories. View this week’s Flying Get here.
Links to the topic page can be found at the top of the articles and in the article preview blurbs. There’s currently no index for the topics.
There are a couple of issues which I’m disclosing due this site’s policy of disclosing when there are a couple of issues.
- Currently, you can’t select the language in the topic page, so you may be overwhelmed with a wall of Japanese content.
- My text search is not implemented correctly. Say you’re a Media Create fanboy and you want to look for all the Media Create sales stories under the Sales & Rankings topic. Enter the search term Media Create, and you’ll only get some of the relevant results, as in some stories the phrase Media Create appears only as possessive “Media Create’s.” Fixing this is just a matter of setting some filters in Solr, the search thing that I use, so I’ll hopefully have this issue taken care of soon.
New content options
On the front page, there’s now an “options” menu. You can select to toggle Japanese stories on/off, English stories on/off and links on/off.
Links are just links to external content. It’s pretty much the only type of Japanese content on the site. I haven’t been doing links to English content, but I may start doing so now, especially when Tokyo Game Show comes around (since I won’t be able to go to Japan this year — BOO). If you just want good old Andriasang.com content, keep the link button off, which is the default state.
Pro tip: by keeping the Japanese option on, you’ll get links to content that I won’t necessarily write about in English or content that I’ll write about in English later in the day. Check out all this stuff from the Japanese list:
I usually steal all Famitsu.com’s screenshots using my sweet image stealing script, so even if you can’t read the text, you can see the pretty pictures.
