HotForBot

It bothers me that Japan has become something of a glamour queen, but in many realms, Hearn’s observations still hold true. This is because a special reverence for traditional crafts pervades Japanese aesthetics. Amid the clamor of technological and economic success, a respect for age, custom, and tradition still endures.

After the war, and subsequent defeat of Japan, they closed themself off from the world around them hoping for nothing from the outside world, but this wouldn’t last for long. The influence of the west was to dominate the entire future of Japan and influence some of the greatest decisions made in Japan for decades to come. The determination of the Japanese people to thrive after having been beaten down was amazing. They literally trannsformmed their entire defeat into a technology producing mechanism that would dominate the world. If you’ve ever visited Japan you would know this. The technological epicenter of the world seems to be in Asia, and much of the stems from Okinawa Japan.

Japan’s early political system was patterned after that of China, but power gradually shifted from the Emperor to the shoguns. Determined to maintain the status quo, in 1639, the great Tokugawa shogunate closed the country to the outside world and plunged Japan into 200 years of isolation. But for travelers to Japan today, that isolation has long from ended, and Japan has opened itself to the world. In just 150 years, Japan has transformed itself from an isolated feudal state into one of the greatest industrial societies on earth, a nation whose current gross national product is second only to the U.S. Yet, with all its 21st century vitality and fervent adoption of contemporary modes, Japan remains resolutely Japanese.

When Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrived on the shores of Japan accompanied by some 300 troops armed with modern weapons, bearing a missive to the Emperor of Japan from U.S. President Millard Fillmore, he also lit the fuse that was to propel Japan into the modern world.

Really though, it’s hard for Japan to not embrace the world with their looming population crisis. Is Japan worth visiting? You betcha, just be sure to book your tickets in advance!

How many times are you sitting around blogging wondering if there’s life beyond Wordpress? Yea, me neither, but I happened to stumble on this Okinawa Travel website that makes me think that Joomla might be getting a little stronger than it was when I knew it as Mambo, the open source CMS. They’ve (Joomla) really got their act together compared to those days. Looking back, development of Joomla seems like the dark ages.

This site has an interesting setup for their Okinawa Japan Pictures gallery. Not real sure what gallery plugin they use, but the layout could be better. The RSS feed layout is nice, but doesn’t really work for me. They may wish to look for other options for the RSS feed syndication, but that appears to be another weakness of Joomla also.

In case you didn’t know, Joomla has been back-to-back winner of the best content management system award for years now, and it’s FREE as in beer. The one thing they really need to beef up is their out-of-the-box search engine friendly URL’s, they just aren’t there, but that’s supposed to be addressed in the 1.5 version. There are tens of thousands of open source junkies that crawl their forums helping to develop this content management system. Some are avid defenders of the faith, and others quickly wake up to reality when they try to set up a simple blog, which is hardly as easy to manage as Wordpress.

Well, it’s worth checking out, for those who are reading this wondering what the heck Joomla is, Joomla is one of the most powerful Open Source Content Management Systems on the planet. It is used all over the world for everything from simple websites to complex corporate applications. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable…according to them anyway!

Welcome to the new HotforBot.com! …It doesn’t matter what it was, this is what it is now…

We’re going to try to make this a resources where you can learn about search engine robots (aka: spiders) so that you can better prepare yourself with an organized website, strategic internet marketing campaigns and staying one step ahead of your competition.

We’ll be making posts on all sorts of topics from a series of guest posters, some not even related to bots directly, but will be indirectly (like our directory) because we’ll be using this seemingly irrelevant content to do some pretty nifty research about…. bots.

So read up on some of our articles, visit some of the links in our resource column, and become a bot expert.