PhilFAQS

Don’t bother digging out your Tagalog or Bisayan dictionaries, those word are in Japanese .. or precisely, Nihongi Nihongo (thanks, Paul) , the official language of Japan … Japan, like the Philippines actually has an abundance of languages, Nihongo is the one foreigners are most likely to learn.

During the years I worked in Japan I got quite familiar with the term in the title, it is the "polite" and "respectful" form of "Forgive Me".  In Japan, especially in the business world, it’s quite easy to breach etiquette and upset someone in a company or government agency, but the correct thing to do it to write them a Gomen Nasia letter and, like magic, the slate is wiped clean and all is forgiven.

I’ve been making too many changes around here … some caused by technical considerations, other due to my own lack of foresight or planning.  "Hindi dahilan", I have no excuse.  I promise to leave things alone now as long as possible.  this is my Gomen Nasai letter to all my faithful readers.

On the plus side, I think you’ll like the new look.  I still need a tool to "collapse" the listing of the pages in the left-hand column.  I took all the advertising banners off as I feel they took up too much space, cluttered things to the readers eye and just looked too tacky.  I may or may not add a banner or two that interests me, but I promise to keep it down "below the fold" so the everyday reader doesn’t have to see it every time.  I will keep a Google or other textual ad in the individual post page mainly because I find items that are of great interest to many readers show up there, based on the content of each post. 

One of the most difficult issues in running a site like this is organization.  There’s already a lot of information and it’s hard to organize it in a format that works for everyone.  So I have taken the next best route.  Multiple ways of organization.  use the one that suits you best, and do let me know if you have suggestions for even better ways to organize.

Keyword Search:   In the top right corner there is a simple search box.  Type in any keyword that describes something you are looking for and the site will return a list of post excerpts that contain that word.  There may be more than one page, depending on how common the word you search for is, check the page links at the bottom of the page to see if there are more search results.

Main Site Pages: Along the top of the header of each page, just above the pictures is a "Main Site Menu" bar.  Notice that these menu selections are ‘live’, they have sub menu items below some entries which you’ll see if you "hover" (hold your mouse over the letters in the word).  This gets you to information like my contact data, advertising information, site policies and disclaimers and an "Archives" page that has every single word ever written here organized by data and post title.  There are also independent "Subject pages" for important clusters of articles that will give you a one-line menu to get to articles by title.  This is a second primary way to try to find what you are looking for.

Category Browse: Each article that gets published here is assigned to one or more categories.  This is probably an area I am really weak in … I have too many categories and my thought process for category assignment has been, shall we say … eclectic.  That’s a near-term project, clean up the categories.  The category selection tool is a drop down, it shows you how many individual posts are in each category.  When you choose one of the categories you’ll get a page (or pages) of excerpts of posts that are assigned in the category you requested.  By design, so posts "fit" more than one category, so if you are looking for something by this method, don’t be afraid to try a similar category if your first browse doesn’t find you what you want.  Method number three.

Monthly Archive Browse:  When you now approximately when you read about something you want to reference again, this is the place for you.  Instead of looking through years of article listings on the main "Archives" page, you can just come here and select what you want to see by month and year.  This may also return a list longer than one page, so be sure to check the links at the bottom of the page to see if there are more articles to browse.  Major Method number four.

All Pages Menu:  Last but certainly not least we have the "master list" of all the pages in the site.  This is the one I mentioned wanting to "collapse" like the categories and archives selections.  No matter what happens in that regard, the location is going to stay the same.  Method number Five to find your way … is there anything I have forgotten?

This post will stay in the database for future reference, and it will also go on it’s own special page in the main page bar for permanent reference.  Happy Reading and browsing.

Related posts:

1. Self Sufficiency
2. Retire Like a King
3. Get There
4. Live There
5. How-To

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.