View source for Ichijodani and Jcastle.info Updates

{{news
|NewsTitle=Ichijodani and Jcastle.info Updates
|NewsDate=2024/01/06
|NewsBody=Happy New Year!

I posted a few things to [https://www.facebook.com/Jcastle.info/ Facebook] recently and then received a couple offline comments like "Welcome Back" or asking if I was taking a break from castles. First, the answer to the latter is "No!" I have just been extremely busy since summer so it's been hard to get much new stuff out. I actually updated these Ichijodani Castle related profiles in August during summer vacation and was waiting to do some other Fukui updates before putting up a news story like this, but I just haven't had time yet. So, formally, here are the new Ichijodani profiles. The article about the [[Ichijodani Castle Town | Ichijodani Valley]] goes into great detail of the history of the valley, why it is important and key points to look out for when visiting. I highly recommend you to start here and then go into the individual castle albums for more details.  

[[Ichijodani Castle Town]]

Throughout the Fall, I have done some castle day trips and focused on visiting new sites during the good castling season rather than update the website. Hopefully, a few things will calm down in the New Year and I can start chipping away at the list of about 40 profiles I need to add or update. I have 7 ready to go and another 33 sets of castle photos to sort. I think I need an intern or assistant! I'm slowly working through 3-4 pockets of castles around Kansai and I plan to update this site in groups of castles around a theme when ready.

As always, as soon as I get a set of photos selected and organized for a castle I'll post them to Facebook before updating the profile on this site, so please Like or Follow the [https://www.facebook.com/Jcastle.info/ Facebook] page for more regular updates of castle visits and some occasional castle related news.  

I'm also working through a little challenge with this website. My host nearly shut me down for being way over the storage limits last November. I deleted some old versions and backup files and just trimmed everything down to the barebones required to run this site. I still have some more work to do, but in the future, I will limit image sizes to 1080px wide (same as FB and IG). I also want to figure out a way to retroactively reduce image dimensions if possible. If there are any great MediaWiki or Unix/ImageMagick users out there who want to help, please let me know!

The reality of hosting a website this massive is that it is not cheap and getting more expensive all the time. I paid under $10 USD/month for almost 20 years, now $15/month as costs increase everywhere. This was an acceptable subscription fee to share my passion with others and to meet the great contributors and castle fans from around the world. But, the site has outgrown hobbyist website plans and will start costing me $30/month from January (excl. domain name fees). If it grows at the current pace, I've been cautioned that in another 18 months I may reach the $60/month plan which is definitely too much for my pocketbook. That's a lot of castle trips I could go on or castle books I could buy! There may be cheaper plans out there, but I've been badly burned by them before.

I do this for the love of the topic and to meet and engage with other castle explorers out there. When I started this site 25yrs ago, there were few resources, even in Japanese, and none in English. Quality English information is still hard to come by. The massive amount of photos and profiles and other articles we've collected in this online encyclopedia, this Jcastlepedia, is truly amazing and one-of-a-kind even in Japanese. If you'd like to help keep it afloat, please consider [https://ko-fi.com/guidetojapanesecastles48058 supporting the site].  I may also look into other support options such as non-intrusive advertising (does this exist?), affiliate links, etc to try and make the site a little more self-supporting. 

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|CastlesReferenced=[[Ichijodani Castle||Asakura Yakata||Ichijodaniyama Castle||Komihanachi Castle||Ichijodani Kojo Castle]]
}}