I upgraded my blog software yesterday, and accidentally deleted the .htaccess file for this blog. That meant that, although the front page was working fine, the archive pages and RSS feed were broken. Thanks to Sheila for pointing it out to me.

Anyway, it looks to me as if everything is working again now. Please let me know if it isn’t. (Yes, I know that wouldn’t be any use if the whole blog were broken. But I think most of it works, so you might be able to read this but still find something broken.)

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My blog has been broken for the last few days, in that I haven’t been able to connect to add entries. It now appears to be fixed again (whether due to something my webhosting company did, or due to the vagaries of Shub-Internet, I know not), so normal service will be resumed as of today.

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If you scroll down a bit, you will see that I have added some Amazon advertising to the sidebar. There are a couple of reasons for this.

One is that these are called “Omakase” links, which is a Japanese word. It means that Amazon’s computers decide what to display. Right now, they seem to be deciding to display links to my books, which I approve of. Of course, that might well change over time, and it is also supposed to depend on the content of the particular page, and possibly even on the identity of the visitor. (If you have an Amazon cookie in your browser, Amazon knows it’s you.)

Another is that I’m a professional writer, so I might as well see whether I can generate an income stream from the blog too. I’ve been registered as an Amazon affiliate for ages, so setting it up was very easy. It shouldn’t be too obtrusive, tucked away in the sidebar, and I’ve put it below the links that are definitely and always to my books.

Since it doesn’t cost me anything to have the links (oddly, Amazon have elected not to charge people for putting adverts for Amazon on their websites) there’s a good chance that they’ll stay there. I’ll also be curious to see what turns up in the automatic selections. Amazon’s algorithms for that tend to be pretty good, but occasionally they do produce rather peculiar results.

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This is my English-language blog, as threatened in my most recent diary entry. As noted there, the aim is for it to supplement, rather than replace, my Japan Diary. The blog should be a quick way to note events and thoughts, while leaving the Diary for accounts of visits and the like; essentially, things with pictures.

Now that it’s set up, it should be easy to update and such, but, unlike my Japanese blog, I don’t plan to update this one every day. I do hope to do it more often than once a month, which is what has tended to happen to my Japan Diary recently.

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