A long wait

I know one should not be frustrated, but how do you help being impatient?

Now our site is placed page rank 4, but the robot of the search engine has not crawled it yet. Our new entries have not yet listed in the search engine. We have not seen a major change at our site analyser, either.

Site management teaches us a lot about Zen.

Do not expect. If yes, it will be counter-productive.

Just be patient and wait. Wait till it happens naturally.

Meanwhile we have started our new project. 

This time we carefully choose the name of the site, referencing a key word analyser.

Let's see what will happen.

Page Rank 4

Finally we made it, but we don't know what it really means.
Yesterday the world best search engine granted our Asakusa Underground a rank 4.
Since we started our site last March, we hadn't had our page rank.
We thought that one could improve his rank step by step.
First one gets rank 1 and moves up to 2, then 3.
Eventually he is accepted the class of big league players, 4+.
That was what we thought, but in reality it is not like that.
One day you wake up, and, voila!, you are in the major league of Internet.
It feels fantastic.
We are very grateful to the people who supported us, especially the site owners who placed the link to our site.
They didn't laugh at us though our site was an n/a. They treated us as their equal.
We must not forget that.
Soon, we hope, we will be receiving e-mails asking for reciprocal links.
We must not be haughty.
We should reach out and help them as the others helped us.
Thank you all.

Family restaurant Juraku

We have posted two new pages at Asakusa Underground:
and .
The former is about a brief analysis on how the Japanese imported and assimilated the consept of a roadside diner.
The later is about cheap sweets in Japan.

Besides, to improve SEO, I wrote an article on our site itself.
By using the words like travel, guide, tokyo, and Japan, we hope that they will place us at a much better position in the search engine.
Lte's see what will happen.

Our Guest Book

Mon Chi-chi has set a guest book page on our Asakusa Underground.

He has also added the mail form to send messages to us.

It is important to hear what the readers think about our site.

Beside, if someone kindly correct our English, we will be more than happy.

After all, the language of Shakespeare is not our mother tongue.

Neculai-san

Mr Neculai Amalinei is a Romanian.

He studies Japan and Japanese culture in Romania.

He has a site about learning Japanese and Japan's culture in English and Romanian.

We placed the link to his site on the article about a Japanese legend.

Romania and modern Japan and ancient Japan sit next to each other.

How wonderful!

Without Internet we couldn't have met each other.

Lancaster Theory

Mon Chi-chi told me about Lancaster Theory.

It is about how you manage your strategy on various sites.

First, when you start managing sites, you concentrate on a niche.

You find a small category which other people pay no attention to and write about it.

Once it attracts a certain level of attention and is successful, you try to branch your activity.

Eventually, you diversify all of your sites.

In conclusion, it is too early for us to do more than two things simultaneously. I stopped translating the articles of Chi-chi's Paint Digital Art Meseum and Quit Your Job site. I postpone them until we have 100 articles and 1000 reciprocal links at Asakusa Underground.

Link Exchange and Paint Digital Art

In the morning I sent e-mails to 10+ site managers.

We don't really know how effective exchanging links is, but at this moment this is the only active way to promote our Asakusa Underground.

In the afternoon I traslated Mon Chi-chi's Paint Digital Art Museum.

It is a type of digital paintings created with Paint soft which comes with Windows.

It looks like naive paintings in the digital world.

Paint Digital Art Museum

Mon Chi-chi is a digital artist.

You can check his creation, but unfortunately at this moment only its Japanese version is available.

The English version is under construction.

Or, more precisely, I am translating the texts accompanying each picture into English.

I haven't done it yet, but it won't be long. 

You can read his profile at Asakusa Underground / About us.

He uses a naive style, but I hope that the visiors to his site can see the delicate balance of his calculation and wildness. It looks simple, but it is far from simplistic.

Self-introduction

Being accepted to dmoz Open Directory Project is truly a emotional boost for us.

At the moment of doubt, we tend to think that nothing will work.

The news has changed our perspectives completely.

Today, I translated Mon Chi-chi's self-introduction and wrote mine.

He is going to draw digital pictures with them.

Besides, he has just told me that he started his blog with his digital art.

It is a little but important step for him. 

Asakusa Underground is proud of him, too.

Accepted to Open Directory Project

Sometimes we have a sign for good news to come.

This time it was a little message from Switzerland, a comment left on my blog.

Its words were really encouraging, something I truly needed.

Like anything else in life, when you manage an Internet site, you have to go through ups and downs.

We haven't had many visits at our site. After the three months of intensive work, I was not a little discouraged by the fact.

The moment I was about to abandon hope, a little voice came from Mila of Switzerland.

Thanks a lot, Mila.

She might not know how much she have helped me with her comment.

I really appreciate her kind words. People say that there are plenty of bad things on Internet, but I would like to say that there are plenty of good things as well, like Mila's encouragement.

Today, we have just been accepted to the prestigious Open Directory Project. Mila's words must have been a good omen for us.

Thanks again, Mila

Misunderstanding

I didn't know anything about site management.

The more links you have, the more visitors you have.

That is what I thought.

Chi-chi has been back from Thailand for a week.

The first thing he said was "Don't be too discouraged though we don't have many visitors at Asakusa Underground".

After all the time and effort since February, the fact that we have 4 visitors per day is not easy to swallow.

The lack of incoming link was the cause, I thought.

Mon Chi-chi said no.

As we increase the number of the articles, we will have better exposure at search engines.

It is enigmatic.

Japanese Poetry recital at Nice (rehearsal)

We had the first rehearsal for the Poetry reading.

It is about several Japanese female poets.

Because of that, I was not able to write an article for Asakusa Underground.

I got a phone call from Mon Chi-Chi, but was not able to talk with him, either.

He will be back in Japan soon.

To buy and sell a bicycle in Asakusa

It doesn't reduce your travel expense even if you buy a bicycle.

If you stay in Tokyo more than one month, it is definitely worth while.

If you stay there for a week, it is not, at least in terms of saving.

Nevertheless, I assure you that you can have totally different experiences in Tokyo with your bike from those of a tourist only using public transportation.

You are freer.

To buy a second hand bicycle is not at all difficult. 

You have various bike shops in Asakusa area. They often sell second hand bikes as well as new ones.

To sell one is another story.

Most of bike shops and second hand shops buy only expensive bikes, which you might not want to buy.

To sell your bicycle, you have to ride it to another district and return to your hotel by train.

Their selling price is between 5,000 yen and 10,000 yen. They don't disclose the buying price.

I will write an article about it now.

By the way, I just got a phone call from my collaborator Chi-chi in Thailand. He will be back in Japan a few day's time. He has taken more than 400 photos there and it is enough to launch another site.

He said, "A prodigious American site manager thinks that you don't have to have many accesses in one site. All you have to do is 1,000 sites with 10 accesses a day".

To promote this blog

It seems like darkness, the darkness of a cave.

It seems to me that there is no one around me.

This is how I feel about the blog with Blogger.

I have blogs in Japanese with another company and it has several services to help us promote our blogs. They seem more helpful to me.

Probably, I don't really understand how this entire site is functioning, and once I get used to it, I will feel that I have written a stupid entry like this.

Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that this blog is like an isolated island floating on the dark surface of a vast ocean.

Occasionally I have visitors as if they were migrating birds looking for a day's rest.

Yesterday, no new link to Asakusa Underground was added to "hope" list. Good news is that a fellow country man from Choshi, Chiba kindly put the link to us in his business site, ArtisticNippon. You can see plenty of beautiful Japanese pots and art crafts there. 

My girlfriend's site is flourishing. Plenty of hits have been recorded already. She has written just one post.

Is there any tips to promote one's own blog?

Mon Chi-Chi, the artist

Mon Chi-Chi and I are creating ASAKUSA Underground, an alternative Tokyo travel site.

My collaborator is a digital artist.

His creation is subtle but audacious.

One can tell immediately that he is talented.

Now it is about time he promoted his art.

Last night we had a long discussion by telephone about the direction of developing our site.

He is in Bangkok now.

It seems that he is a little confused.

He is the son of my cousin.

We are running a bit of a family business.

the first two month of Asakusa Underground

Two months have passed since my cousin and I started Asakusa Underground travel site.

It is about time we summarise what we have done and have not done.

Since my collaborator is travelling in Thailand and I am away from Japan in France, our project that has been advancing satisfactorily is now at rest, which is fine and necessary for us to stand still, breathe well, and look back calmly.

As for articles, we have written more than thirty of them, in which "English Conversation Cafe" is the last one. We have another article "A Shelter from the Japanese Society" to be checked and posted in the site. As a whole, it is a good pace.

In terms of links, we have no means to measure what we have achieved. We have sent many e-mails asking reciprocal links and registered our site at twenty something search engines. At this moment, we do not know how effective it has been. We will see it after Mon Chi-chi is back from Thailand and set a site analyser on our pages. I can not do it here since we respect each other's role: Chi-chi takes care of the site management and its graphic creation and I, writings in English. After all, I don't know anything about Html codes and site designs. Once he is back, we are going to do a big clean-up of dead links, errors in the articles, and so forth. The analyser will be added then. 

Last night, I finished typing my play "The Hag (Yama-Uba)", which is an adaptation from a Noh play supposed to be written by Ikkyu, an extraordinary Japanese Zen master in the 14th century. I will translate it into French, but at the moment I want to work on travel articles for Asakusa Underground.