Late March, 2012, has been exceptionally and unseasonably sunny and warm in London, but I have been staying inside. This is partly because I suffer from hay fever, but also because I have been changing a few things on this site. I should know better than fiddling things frequently, but more or less on a whim, I decided to reorganize it.
As you may be aware, this website is divided into two large sections by language. There is an English version of this site, and a Japanese version. They are not exact copies of each other, as many articles are different, but it was under the same umbrella, as it were, as they were all organized under www.wasaweb.net. To be more specific, until a few days ago, I used subdirectories to separate the two languages, so the English version of this site could be found at www.wasaweb.net/en/ and the Japanese version of the site at www.wasaweb.net/ja/. Now, the site is organized into two subdomains, en.wasaweb.net for the English version, and ja.wasaweb.net for the Japanese version.
I have toyed with the idea of using subdomains instead of subdirectories for this site before, but I liked the uniformity of URIs starting with www.wasaweb.net, and anecdotally, some people don’t trust website addresses not starting with a www. There were a few reasons that prompted me to make this change, but mainly because it gave a clearer distinction between the two parts. The lack of a clear distinction, in that the subdirectories shared the same domain (www.wasaweb.net), caused some complications. It has become difficult, for example, to establish the link between the site and its Google+ page by using the publisher mark-up.
The change has been mostly positive, since the third-party plug-ins can be set for each language, though there are a few things that need finalizing. The most serious problem relates to the commenting platform. I think I have messed up and the comments are not displayed, and I would like to offer my apologies to those who have commented on the site previously. As mentioned before, maintaining a website is always a project, never a finished product. There will be further changes in the future, and this one may well be a minor example, compared to things to come. I would like to be in as much control as possible, and not to be left too far behind with the new developments.