London Korean Links

16 September 2006: Header on site amended to be Xhtml Transitional rather than Strict. That solves the problem where Firefox wasn’t loading some of my pages.

15 September 2006: Tweaked Flickr plugin code with new API key to address the collapse in the Flickr feed.

21 June 2006: Ask my web service provider to redirect people from my Publisher site to my Blog. Redirection causes a few issues. Back to the drawing board.

20 June 2006: Next stages in geekdom: A book on php & MySQL arrives from Amazon, together with pocket reference books on XHTML, CSS and PHP.

19 June 2006: The removal of page border, margins & padding still hasn’t fixed the problem with posts disappearing below the second column. Solution: I reduce the element width to 55% from 59%.

17 June 2006: All pages now transferred over apart from Contact form, LKF questionnaire and What’s On. These will follow once I’ve mugged up on php and MySQL. Border, padding and margin removed from body to address the problems with IE and Firefox. All pages now linked from Header.

Start experimenting with redirecting the home page to the blog, using .htaccess. No luck yet.

16 June 2006: start investigating Calendar / What’s On plug-ins, but none of them seem quite right.

13 June 2006: Food page transferred across from Publisher site

12 June 2006: Buoyed by past success, I write some code to get subheadings within posts and pages looking pretty. It’s modeled on the existing formating for post headers. New code is:

div.post-subtitle {
background: #fff;
color: #111;
display: block;
height: 1.45em;
margin: 0 0 -0.25em 0;
padding: 0 0.4em 1px 0.4em;
}
h3.post-subtitle {
margin: 0;
font-size: 0.9em;
font-weight: normal;
float: left;
}
I road-test it on my Film page thus:

Information

The code fails dismally.

11 June 2006:

• Flickr album page v1 set up (page header needs work). Not public yet.
• Turned on pretty permalinks to enable Flickr to work
• Activated Akismet Spamfilter
• Film & DVD page goes live on WordPress
• Slightly change format of home page using summarised posts (home.php) as opposed to full posts (index.php). I think it looks tidier
• Ordered a teach-yourself php & MySQL book from amazon, as well as pocket xhtml & css reference books.

9/10 June 2006: Transfered all reviews of film books over from Publisher to WordPress

9 June 2006: I feel I’ve arrived in the blogging community - my first link & blockquote from another blog… http://www.d-log.info/?p=1353.

8/9 June 2006: Transfered all reviews of “Literature In English” books over from Publisher to WordPress. Copied over the pages on film & DVD, & the main books page.

28 May 2006. What’s On page updated for an art exhibition in the Cat Hill Gallery, SW18, by Roh Sook-ja.

27 May 2006: Frenetic activity as I design & post a survey for the London Korean Festival, using MyContactForm
17 May 2006. What’s On page updated for a one week course (evening classes) in Korean traditional drumming at SOAS, 17-21 July.

13 May 2006. Schedule for London Korean Film Festival announced. Details of the films are in my blog, and the exact timings are on Jase’s site, www.koreanfilm.org.uk. See you all there.

9 May 2006. What’s On page updated for a gig by a young Korean band down in Wimbledon on Thursday 11th. One of the members is a friend of Hyun-ho’s cousin, and Hyun-ho regularly updates me on Korean events - so support this event. The details look good.

7 May 2006. Some additions to the About this Site page. Thanks to Park Soyang for translating.

6 May 2006. Welcome to visitors Alice Bennell’s campaign blog, Show DJG on the BBC. Thanks for the link, Alice. I love your campaign graphic.

2 May 2006. Fairly big update of my What’s On page is in progress. I just got a handbill of events for the rest of the year from the Korean Cultural Promotion Agency. 2006 is a good year! Problem is, there’s a couple of discrepancies between the handbill and the KCPA website. I’ll post the definitive details once I know them. Which may take a while as the email addresses which they give on their website and on their handbill seem not to be in operation. I think I had a rant somewhere about Koreans in London not living up to their national reputation for web-savviness. I’m losing count of examples of this now.

1 May 2006. Welcome to visitors from the Korean Blog List, http://korea.banoffeepie.com/. My blog is now listed there.

1 May 2006. Put all April 2006 front page stuff into a separate archive. Updated What’s On page for the BAKS conference in Sheffield, 6-7 September 2006. Provided link to K-pop site Solid07 in my music page. Also a new link to the news aggregator service southkoreanews.net and to the well-established blogger The Marmot, on my newspapers page.

27 April 2006: Updated the Food & Restaurants page for a new recommendation - Busan in Holloway Road.

26 April 2006: Removed reference to the Lee Soo Young concert on 24 May on the What’s On page, which isn’t happening. Added the open-air Korean festival in Kingston on 12 August.

24 April 2006: More What’s On updates: a talk on Modern Korean Culture on 5 June and a history talk at SOAS this Thursday, 27 April.

Also, I just received an email from Yonhap News, responding to my query. Their premium news service costs $350 per month. Hmm. Let me see, 10 DVDs per month plus a pint of London Pride per day, or unlimited access to another Korean news website? I think I’ll take the beer and films.

22 April 2006: More What’s On updates: a talk on Korea’s economic development at the LSE on 2 May, and a talk on Korean ceramics at Asia House on 25 May. May’s going to be busy!

21 April 2006: In the interests of diversity of views I’ve started posting the periodic e-bulletins received from the DPRK embassy in London. You’ll find them in the blog section. The bulletins are posted unedited.

20 April 2006: More What’s On updates: the Little Monk screening at the Royal College of Art is confirmed, I’ve just spotted some Tartan screenings at the Prince Charles (majoring on the usual spook/frightfest stuff, but also the more interesting Blood Rain). Plus what looks like a fascinating ceramics exhibition in Dover Street in early June, a highly topical talk on Korea / Japan relations by the Korean ambassador to Japan on 3 May, and an interesting talk on East Asian history at Asia House, also on 3 May.

18 April 2006: Updated the What’s On page for a film screening on 28 April. Got an email from out of the blue today, advising of an upcoming screening at the Royal College of Art. Strange place for a screening, and I await to hear more about whether it’s part of a series; and why. And the choice of film is a little odd: A Little Monk. Not one of the films which leap out as something which has to be seen. But on further investigation it’s had some good reviews at koreanfilm.org, by Kim Kyu Hyun and Anthony Leong, so I’ll try and go along. It’s on 28 April at 7pm.

14 April 2006: Updated the What’s On page for a concert in Cambridge on 23 May: looks like a preview of the Korean Breeze concert in London on 24 May which clashes with the Lee Soo Young gig - so if I’m feeling really dedicated I might pop up to Cambridge on the 23rd. Also posted a holiday snap on the Art page.
11 April 2006: Posted a brief review of todays amazing dance performance of Chunhyang by the Eun Me Ahn company.

10 April 2006: Having started playing with WordPress, which doesn’t do everything I want it to (at least not easily, as far as I can see) I’m now trying TextPattern, which seems to promise more than it can deliver, doesn’t want to install properly and is altogether too complicated. There must be a user-friendly website creator out there. Ohmygosh, am I going to have to try FrontPage? If anyone has any recommendations, let me know.

Meanwhile, I’m not spending much time on content. But I am listening to some new CDs which YesAsia just delivered, so maybe I’ll get around to reviewing those soon. Oldfish, Humming Urban Stereo, Yoon Do Hyun and Clazziquai.

9 April 2006: Posted a review of Harold Hakwon Sunoo’s “Life and Poems of Three Koreans”. That was a real struggle. The review is right down at the bottom of the page. As I said somewhere else, the navigation on this site is pretty rudimentary, for which I apologise. I’m working on this:

Started experimenting with WordPress, now my webhost seems to have sorted out the MySQL database problem. I’m really feeling my way here, but the work in progress is here. I’m hoping the finished product will be easier to maintain and easier to search and navigate, but it’s going to require a lot of trial & error on my part before we get there. Actually, it’s less work in progress than work hardly started. It’ll be a while before it’s usable, but if in the meantime if you feel like leaving comments on the individual postings, please do so: any postings I make from today onwards until I get the replacement site up and running will be made both on these familiar pages and on the replacement site. It’s the replacement site which has the comments functionality.

7 April 2006: Created new reviews page for brief notes of some of the London concerts & shows, to which you can navigate from the What’s On page.

Provided some additional links on my book pages, to the Korean book catalogue from the 2005 Frankfurt Book Fair and to reviews on the Complete Review site. Also posted a review of Hwang Sok-yong’s The Guest. Buy that book.

Ever since I uploaded some blogware into my webspace, the webhost’s database functionality has been out of commission. I’m hoping there’s no causal linkage. But all of this means that I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, so I’m still moving text boxes round the page. To make it quicker, I’ve archived my March blog entries on a separate page.

6 April 2006: Writers wanted for books on Korean film. If there are any budding authors out there, there are some books projects in the pipeline which need you. See my posting on Darcy’s site here.

2 April 2006: Provided a couple of additional links on the North Korean and Other Links pages.
Coming soon, maybe, a tarted-up blog page. I’m spending too much time creating new text boxes and moving the old ones down the page. So I’m experimenting with blogware and maybe this site might get easier to maintain, with a better ability to leave comment

31 March 2006: Thanks to Max Christian for sending details of a Daegum concert at St James’s Piccadilly on 6 April, now posted on the What’s on page

31 March 2006: Tracking the googlebot. Google is working its random way through the site. So far it has cached 7 pages:

• 17 March: Home page
• 20 March: Music page
• 27 March: Books main, Film, newspapers, travel and contact pages.

We’re getting there.

30 March 2006: Silverscreen went into administration yesterday, so I’ve had to remove it from the list of retail outlets where I browse for DVDs on my films page.

29 March 2006: Finished reading Stephen Turnbull’s Samurai Invasion. Comments posted in my history books page. And worked out how to get rid of the musical notation in the background of my MS Publisher template. Now starts the search for something more appropriate.

27 March 2006: A few extra links provided to some film review sites on my film page which I missed when I first wrote the page.

25 March 2006: Created a short page on North Korea (which is very much work in progress), and hoovered up a couple of pages which contained little more than web links and combined them on to one “Other Links” page.

24 March 2006: Expanded the sections on Korean TV Drama and popular music, including some extra links

22 March 2006: Thanks to Khang Hyun-ho for telling me about an upcoming dance event at the Peacock - now posted in What’s On in London; and thanks to Aidan Foster-Carter for publicising this site in academic circles. It’s rather intimidating to think that brainboxes might be visiting this site.

I’ve finally posted a report of the “What a difference a region makes” conference held on 17/18 March

21 March 2006: Thanks to Orienkorean and Hu Puzhong for their feedback on the site. I’m hoping Orienkorean will contribute some material to expand the music page, but in the meanwhile I’ve posted his links to some Korean punk sites there.

The other thing I’m hoping is that this site doesn’t need to develop beyond my capacity to support it. I’m no html geek. This site is done in Microsoft Publisher, which is really nothing much more sophisticated than Powerpoint, and using a Bill Gates standard template (which is why the background to the page isn’t very Korean, though I’ll try to remedy that). Any html I need I’m going to have to copy from somewhere. Right now, as you can see, navigation round this site is very basic. Any more advanced features such as forums, polls etc are not on the cards yet. If there’s no html I can crib for free, it’s not going to get done, and I’m not going to learn any complicated html editing programme in a hurry. So what you see is what you’re going to get for the foreseeable future: I can’t walk properly yet, so I’m not going to try running for a while.
19 March 2006: New Conference Reports page created. What A Difference A Region Makes to come soon.

19 March 2006: Finish Three Generations & post brief review

16 March 2006: Post the timing of the 2006 London Korean Festival, and a review of Korean Stories

2 March 2006: Registered www.londonkoreanlinks.net name and moved site to Easyspace web hosting service

21 February 2006: Website launched (using Publisher) on Blueyonder’s free personal web page space

16 February 2006: Started writing initial material