Ang Dabawenyo

I’m so happy to announce that — finally! — I’ve gotten around to completing my Japanese-language WordPress blog: (ManMaru Kükan or “Maru’s Space”). I’ve had my maruo.blogspot.com blog forever (and it’s actually doing very well, SEO-wise), but I’d always wanted to port it to WordPress — I just never had that push I needed to do it.

But last week I got a Japanese client who’s asked me to include their website as part of my deliverables. And one of my closest friends, Ichido Miyake, has also decided to start blogging already. He’s begun writing in English for Bob Martin’s Live in the Philippines Web magazine, and will soon publish his Japanese articles on his own blog.

With that, I finally took a look at WordPress Nihongo edition and started tinkering with it. It wasn’t so difficult as I’d first imagined. IMHO, WordPress’ language localization is top-notch! You just have to RTFM first, of course!

Many plugins that I like using on my various blogs aren’t as friendly to the Japanese language, in which the word order is totally opposite of English or Tagalog. So I had to manually edit and translate the texts of those plugins. It was fun, though. And good practice for me.

I also discovered something about WordPress because of this move. WP now has an import tool for Blogger! I don’t know if it’s a recent development in v2.3, but it’s awesome! It imports your posts, categories (Blogger tags to WP categories) and comments! You are also able to associate your destination blog’s author name with that of your source’s (blogspot.com user). Not your uploaded photos, though… but I’m not complaining.

Over at ManMaru Kükan, I’ll continue talking about Davao and my work with the Japanese (those that I can discuss anyway), as well as my exploits in Nihongo. This blog also serves as a tool for developing my language skills. So, if you’re a student of the Japanese language like me, head on over to my blog and let’s practice together!