I’ve been working on an idea for the new TheJapanesePage.com all afternoon. Sometimes I get an idea and it works smoothly. Other times… are more like today.

I had an idea to improve upon the random kanji as displayed on the current version of TheJapanesePage.com. I played with Swish grabbing data from a flat text file containing the kanji information. Swish is an inexpensive way to make Flash animations. For the most part it has been all I’ve needed over the years. (However I did buy the Adobe Suite which includes Flash and as soon as it arrives I’ll have a lot of fun playing with it)

After an hour or so I managed to get a script to read text from a text file and display it any way I wanted it to. Small problem however. It wouldn’t display Japanese. The text file was Unicode, but apparently Swish is not.

I spent the next three hours wrestling with that. Then I decided to make each kanji a swf itself and then just have a javascript script call any of the swf files randomly. Another two to three hours later, I had five working examples.

Anyway, working on the new site has eaten up my 1Nichi1Kai time. As soon as the site is moved, I will have a lot of time for fun - working on 1Nichi1Kai, making videos and audio stuffs.