I just got another friend request from someone who claims to be a "Ninja Sōke" (I only know one and he is not on fb!). I usually say yes to everyone who seems to be a Bujinkan member, or someone I know. This guy probably just want my name to add credibility to what he is claiming. I see we had 37 mutual friends, all (I think) is Bujinkan members. I wonder why do you add people like these as your fb friend, unless you know them?

It's like saying, hi I'm a ninja master and look at all my high ranking Facebook "friends" from other styles who know and respect me and my style. When in fact they never met each other. His poor students he con might not know this. At least I don't want my name associated with someone like this.

On the other hand I say yes to all friend invites from people who seems to be a Bujinkan member. We have probably met, and I don't remember names easily. Or we will probably meet each other in the future, being in the same organisation and travels around frequently.

So what I meant with this rant is that I think we should be more careful on Facebook, and who we associate us together with.

I just made and uploaded web site banners for the NinZine to this directory… http://bujinkan.me/banners/. I made seven different sizes you can use, there is also the PSD file if you want to customize it even more.

Thank you for sponsoring us .

I just found my old web site on archive.org , and a lot of memories comes back. When I made my first web site (in 1994 or 1995?) there was only one other web site on the whole internets that contained the word "Bujinkan" (I think his name was Shawn (an American not Canadian )). But before that I operated my own Fidonet BBS called 2:201/2123 Moko no Tora BBS on a computer under my bed between 1992-1996 (approximately, I don't remember exactly). I was also at Compuserve when they got their first modem pool in Sweden. At that time you could not access the internets from your home as a private person. There was no provider that offered a modem pool you could call up, it was only at big companies and university's at this time. Until Ragnar Lönn started Algonet in 1994 offering a connection for private persons. If I remember correctly, I got my subscription around Christmas time, and immediately started learning HTML by making the web site.

There was only the MS *plorer and Netscape browsers, I remember Netscape was better because you could change the colours on the fonts and background. There was HTML programs, but they where buggy, annoying and didn't keep up with the new features that the Netscape browser gave. So I learned typing HTML with a simple text editor. I still do this, but I also use a CMS system (this site is on W0rpqr*ss ).

Over the years I had projects that grew too big to handle. More and more people got Internet and found my web site, I see that in the oldest record on the way back machine at archive.org that in May 2000 I had 154 016 hits since march 1995, I'm not sure if that counts the hits I had before on my Algonet page (yes it still sucks!). In January 2002 I had 426 844 hits, Anyway some of the bigger projects was...

BUUYUU www.martial.arts links project

This was link site with thousands of Martial Arts links, driven by a text database, but someone had to manually update with new links, lot's of work. Thanks to Baubak G who helped me with this!

Masai forum board

Means polish your sword or skills. With a couple of thousand members it could sometimes get maybe too political, but often there was good discussions. Back then people where new to the internets and was willing to share stuff, even if it wasn't well researched (me included).

NinZine

NinZine actually started before in my Fidonet and Compuserve days. It was a type of multimedia magazine where you needed a PC with DOS to make it work. Later Liz made Ura & Omote which was more text based articles. I think I only released five or six issues. I tried to find the old zip files but can't find them. If anyone have them, please contact me . I have planned for a while to use the NinZine name again for the bujinkan.me web site project.

Bushikai (the whole Bujinkan world on one site)

Was a kind of portal for each country that showed links to web sites, clubs and local seminars for respective country. Here is Sweden for example (13 training groups, 23 web sites and 6 seminars registered at the time).

Ryu-ha history

This was probably the most popular segment. Thanks to Peter C who gave me most of the school information in the beginning. I added more and more to the pages without thinking or being able to check it's sources.

At the end I removed most of the ryu-ha history notes because I was fed up with some people who knew better that liked to critizice instead of helping, people who took the information and presented it as their own. But mostly because it became too much work, people expected me to update the web site continually, and I wasn't making any money on it. In 2005 I moved the forum to another web site, and about his time I went from 10 000 hits per month to a couple of thousand.

today...

Sure I miss some of the projects a little, but if it means I have to do all the work and it is too much work or I don't enjoy it I won't do it any more. But I moved some of the projects to the bujinkan.me web site...

• The bujinkan.me/ninzine is the new NinZine! It is a script that get articles via selected RSS sources. Contributions is by people with their own blogs that I think make a good contribution to the Bujinkan community.
• The Dojo locator is the new Dojo address database!. This is now handled by Google places, just make sure to include Bujinkan as a tag to get included here.
• The Seminar database is practically the same as before.
• The links..., when I started there was no Google!

My Kabutoshimen / Kesshi web site is more my personal web site and blog, if you are interested in what I'm up to. The Kaigozan Dojo web site is my dojo. I got a bunch of other sites to, I keep it separated (Bujinkan, me, dojo etc.)...

Well I don't know how to wrap this article!
Can't believe I've been doing this for more than 15 years!
I wonder how it will look like in another 15 years?

Anyway... HAPPY TRAINING!
( I think I used this phrase for 15 years to )

/Mats

I updated to the newest wordpress 2.6.2 and five plugin updates, please let me know if something does not work

I’ve been working on a new seminar list. I totally rewrote all code to php, it is much faster than the old one. There is a few things I need to figure out before I remove the “beta tag”, but it is already very usable (open the page and look at the page source for options).

Here is the link for preview http://kesshi.com/seminars/bujinkan.php

This weekend I’m at a seminar, then I take a week off over the holiday, then new year and off to Japan. So I don’t know when and how much time I have to work on it.

If you have any ideas, please let me know, add a comment here or contact me!

Merry christmas and happy new year!

Every December the Next month seminars would show the whole past year. It was a scripting bug that I have fixed now. Since it is december next month it should default to January and forwards, but there is also a tab with Next years seminars so instead I added a message that it is the end of this year and look at next year for future seminars.

Here is the PHP code if you want include it on your web site.

<?php
$nextmonth = mktime(0, 0, 0, date(“m”)+1);
$monta = date(“m”, $nextmonth);
if ( $monta == “01″ )
{ $yerra = date(“Y”)+1 ;
echo “<p>It is probably December now, click on Seminars next year</p>”;
}
else
{ $yerra = date(“Y”) ;
$ch = curl_init(“http://www.kesshi.com/cgi-bin/SEMINARS-ME2.cgi?$yerra-$monta”);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
}
?>

If you want more examples how to display seminars from the database on your web site, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
I really do encourage all web masters to use any code they want (mine or modified) to display seminars from the seminar database.

Here is a direct link to the Bujinkan seminar RSS feed. When a new seminar is added to the database it will be posted here. Subscribe to this feed and you will get notified immediately when the seminar is adverticed.

For the full seminar list which is chronologically sorted to each month we still recommend you check out this page or this once on a while. If you use facebook, add this Facebook application.

As you may have noticed I have been very busy updating all my/our web sites with new style and skins. Most of the sites is 100% XHTML validated, and should look the same on all browsers. They look best on Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and iExporer (in that order!). Some of the sites that is updated is (in no particular order)…

Web sites (all is hand coded)
kesshi.com
kaigozan.se
taikai.se (runs on Drupal)
budoshop.se (runs on MagentoCommerce)
bujinkan.me

Blogs (all is WordPress MU with different skins)
bujinkan.me/blogs
kabuto.bujinkan.me/blogs
kaigozan.bujinkan.me/blogs
seminars.bujinkan.me/blogs
taikai.bujinkan.me/blogs
selfdefence.bujinkan.me/blogs
budoshop.bujinkan.me/blogs

todo (sites that need something)
budo-taijutsu.net (maybe? low priority)

I need to do a Site map of all my/our web sites is necessary, to keep track of them all, anyone have any ideas? Please comment!

I’ve been working with two stylesheets, one for devices bigger than 480px which would be people browsing on a computer. And one stylesheet that gets called if the screen resolution is smaller, which would be mobile devices, specifically for iPhone and iTouch.

These pages look best in the following order Safari then Firefox. Opera and iExplorer last. Click on the next page to see screendumps from each browser.

Safari 3.12 (as it should look)

Firefox 3.01 (missing the glow effect on headers)

Opera 9.20 (also missing the rounded corners in headers)

iExplorer 7 (looks similar to Opera, the menu (not showed here) looks weird and needs more tweaking)

This is how it looks with Safari on the iPhone

It would be interesting to see screendumps from other browsers, especially phones. Please send it to us!

Welcome to Bujinkan.me. This blog was installed, I will start blogging here soon .

This web site is under construction. It is optimized for iPhone and browsers capable of CSS3/W3C standards such as Safari, Opera and Firefox.