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SWITCHING WEBSITES ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB
In late February 2016, my thirty years of history research were finally moved to www.magiminiland.org/. This had actually been planned for some time. (The term "Magiminiland" had been purposely put without fanfare into the Keywords of the home page since before mid-May 2011.) During especially the first two months of the new site, I searched for and contacted webmasters whose sites had links to the history information with a phoenixbonsai.com address to tell them about the new site version. Additionally, I happened upon a handful of sites that could potentially have new links to this material. I also announced on Facebook, Internet Bonsai Forum, BonsaiNut, Ausbonsai, and LinkedIn about the changeover. Bonsai Mary Miller was kind enough to mention it in her blog. Surprisingly, the Wayback Machine, a tremendously useful archive, already had two early archivings. In a short time only the magiminiland versions were showing up on Google under bonsai history links -- besides a few random and very mysterious old www.users.qwest.net/~rjbphx/ versions. (I have no idea why those were still considered active by Google. Because I don't remember the administrator information to this website of mine that had not been actively used since late 2000, I couldn't get the folks at the current version of qwest => U.S. West => CenturyLink to tell Google to delete references to those pages.) Still, I see that many overseas visitors were going to phoenixbonsai for this info -- but because of an early link on the Magical Miniature Landscapes listing on the club's home page, several visitors have found their way quickly over. Many of the links also were on archival type sites -- issues of magazines or newspaper articles, for instance, which could not be changed over. So, I was/am, in effect, competing with my 17-year-old phoenixbonsai.com web-self for visitors who were looking for my information. (Two months after the new site was set-up and had had 1,461 visitors, I recorded that the Phoenix site had had some 63,490 visitors since its start in 1999. And, as it turned out, late August 2019 would be the last month that the Phoenix site had its visitor counter before another significant facelift: MML = 9,177 vs. PBS = 77,151.) Plus, we haven't gotten very many e-mails from people asking about the broken links to these actually moved pages. My association with the Pikes Peak Bonsai Society faded on good terms: when I mentioned to their president that I was changing websites and I could still offer him space on the new one for the Pikes Peak club, he said that he preferred their Facebook page. So, to maintain an archive of their newsletters and some other info, including the club history I had compiled, I put up a page for them. As that club's meeting date was changed to a [for me] less convenient time and location, and I hadn't been able to attend for a while, we parted on open-ended terms. (The club morphed into a smaller study group, and then in 2019 president Steve Alford retired from teaching and selling bonsai, effectively ending any type of formal bonsai education in the Colorado Springs area.) Throughout the month of May 2016 I went through my pages to emphasize something which had always been hiding in plain sight there: multilingual links. So national/language flags were soon popping up on Big Picture, Forums and Blogs, Magazines, among others, emphasizing additional useful features. Early on when the pages were transferred from phoenixbonsai its site map was shortened. In June a newer version of the club homepage was introduced and reference to most of the old history pages vanished. A few key links have been retained. I remain on good terms with those desert-dwelling Phoenix Bonsai folks and I am still the historian and former co-webmaster of that site -- therefore, on the executive board. And, of course, there is a link to our website near the top of their website. A dedicated site for my material was primarily set up (with a different web host) for the sake of my family years down the road... Earlier inquiries about dividing up the phoenixbonsai site in the event of my death or incapacitation were never really addressed outside the family and so the question about what would happen to my material was not adequately settled. Attempts at a Last Will and Testament putting forth the division were clumsy, at best. So, I feel that magiminiland.org is the best of all possible worlds -- ".org" being truer to its nature than ".com." The color design harkens back to the "classic" [aka "old school," according to one forum commenter, which description I proudly carry] home page, and the slightly increasing number of links on the home page -- essentially, a primary site map, although the detailed Site Map has since been added -- portrays a better make-up of the entire web site. (Because of the fact that this new site was less than a year or two old, certain robotic authorities labeled the site as "Dangerous" since it just might all be a ploy by nefarious individuals to get innocents to click on any number of malicious embedded links. Time has slowly healed that designation...) Since 2012 a lot more of my horticultural attention had been put into my fenced vegetable garden at our modest ranch-style rental house just south of Colorado Springs, Colorado. Alas, even as I wasorganically feeding the soil, productivity of the rotated crop families varied from year-to-year. Again, my ability to explain the theory surpassed my horticultural applications... But despite less than optimal quantities and qualities of produce, I was able to share with my wonderful wife, her cooking and our family several garden-fresh and tasty vegetables at least during the summer and fall. (And, yes, I kept detailed notes. BTW, My dad never kept any type of notes on his Cleveland or Phoenix gardens -- it is just something I added with this 8th garden I've been involved in throughout stays in 3 states. Notes were also kept for my first fresh-water aquarium starting in March 1968 thru end of 1973, for my salt-water aquaria -- July 1998 to Aug. 2010 -- and for my latest fresh-water one, April 2015 to June 2021.) We were been able to dehydrate mint, chives, and parsley for use into the following January or longer. My three attempts at producing home-made sauerkraut resulted in only a single edible (but slightly over-salted) batch, the first one I actually had attempted. I may or may not try that again. The allium family with chives, garlic, and bulb onions were definitely my most successful crops. And each year I had more and more "volunteers" arise in my vegetable garden from various seeds of all types released one or even two years ago. I even had a few potatoes come up after three years. (I could tell from the locations since I rotated.) Maybe at some point I will have a self-renewing perennial garden... This particular garden was under my care through the Spring of 2021 when we had to move due to the elderly landlord's passing and us not able to afford to buy the property in the midst of the nation-wide housing bubble. (I haven't yet added here a follow-up about the new rental property we moved in two years later as we are still settling in and re-establishing bonsai almost from scratch and doing a bit of flower-scaping. Early on I did plant a couple of chive bunches from the local nursery in this front flower bed for the sake of my grandaughter who continues to eat the pungent leaves deliberately and freely.) By 2016 I was caring for less than a dozen bonsai, mostly outdoors, several being Siberian elm (Ulmus pumila) multi-trunks and forests that were originally "volunteers" in the yard and which I'd been trimming back for a few years before transplanting. In the Spring of 2019 I added a modest growing bed for a few more volunteer elms in a corner of my vegetable garden. The cut-off bottoms of 15-gallon black plastic nursery containers were the flat plates under the trees to facilitate lateral root growth. Back in Phoenix I also had a year or two of growing bed experience.) At the beginning of August 2016 I started to compile a modest list of permanent collections of bonsai and penjing around the world. As usual, it was only because no one else had apparently put together such a detailed global compilation. Within two weeks I had established the current format and proceeded to grow the listing to its present roughly 230 locations. Of course, the challenge here is deciding which nurseries can also double for reasonable displays of these miniature landscapes within the somewhat arbitrary guidelines I established. The Google Translate code was added to the top of a number of key pages around the middle of November after I discovered this fascinating little tool on my Monday through Friday work's home page. In January 2017, I finally started adding graphics to this page you are reading to better tell the tale. And sometime early that year I added colored birthdates and/or deathdates to the Book of Days index. (I would start adding those into the actual body of the project by year end.) A very favorable mention for the site on Reddit in mid-September resulted in a several day spike in visitors to our home page. I opened up a Reddit account and have occasionally suggested that more detailed information about a topic being discussed could be found on one of our site pages. (And I see we were already added to the bonsai section's Additional Resources.) In the first week of October I happened upon a post which sought to compile a global map of various bonsai museums and nurseries. I, naturally, weighed in, and within a day the locations of our Permanent Collections page were being incorporated into this ongoing project. I do plan on occasionally researching this map for new entries into our listing. In late September, I took up a suggestion made by an old acquaintance of mine, Alejandro Bedini G., to begin archiving videos that were not saved elsewhere. The YouTube channel MagiMiniLand is the ongoing location. The several Black Scissors demo videos from earlier in September are a special exception (with permission) because of their unique nature. We plan to have more videos (and audios) from up through the 1990s to preserve the legacy of earlier teachers and artists. On October 8 I published the first edition of a listing which had gone through various although smaller permutations over the years in my writings, When Various Clubs and Associations Were Founded. Towards the end of the following month, I published the first edition of the listing for approximate dates that various other clubs had started. An art dealer in January 2018 emailed me about a John Naka oil painting he had come across. He was happy that my Naka bio was available so he could give additional background to his clients. He offered me images from the painting for use on the website, but I was hesitant: I'd never seen John's simple lettered signature before -- I had always seen the cursive signing of his workshop sketches. Reaching out to the Phoenix club, I was referred to one of John's students in California, Cheryl Manning, who vouched for the painting's signature. The additional information can now be found here. The Phoenix Bonsai Society asked me to fly into town for their eighth annual Spring Show on April 7 and 8 to do the critique of trees. Following a brief introduction of myself to about twenty club members assembled after the public viewing was over for Saturday, I presented an abbreviated history of bonsai and then launched into a wide-ranging critique of several of the compositions shown. Emphasis was placed on sharing what the owners had done up to this point and what they expected the trees to look like in 5 to 10 more years. This was done especially for the benefit of the newer members so that they could be aware of potential development in our work. The presentation was well-received. In the days before the talk, I had had a rough idea of mentioning the legacy aspect of what we do as our teachers had done, and from there I would "wing it." During the middle of the night before/early morning of the talk, I woke up with the basic history structure figured out and wrote out the speech more or less verbatim and in sequence from my memory of the historical timelines and events. That weekend it was good to see some of the "old gang" from the club and meet the newer members I had seen in photos of club events or seen via Skyping at quarterly board meetings over the past couple of years. (It took me about 24 hours to renew my knowledge of the plant material used for bonsai in Arizona. I was also able to catch up with my younger brother Jeffrey over dinner. All-in-all, however, it seems to me that Phoenix had grown too much for my tastes -- and I missed the sight of the dark green tree-covered mountains of Colorado.) In late February 2019 I started to put together a blend of the Conventions and Kokufuten formats to tell the story now of the Taikan-ten exhibitions. References to the "Prime Minister" awards were found to be related to two fairly large shows in Japan, and I felt the need to give some background on at least the more prominent event where the awards are presented. On June 12 I was initially contacted by Tyler Hill of the History Colorado Center to see if I'd be interested in doing an interview with them for a documentary podcast. And so on July 13, I sat for a recorded 2-hour-long interview by Tyler and producer Noel Black. The topic was the Denver Bonsai Club, the Amache/Granada, CO, internment camp during WWII and the preservation of traditional Japanese arts by the 8 men who started the Denver club in 1945. My interviewers had already talked with a few people who were in the camp, some people from the Denver club (now the Rocky Mountain Bonsai Society), and even Ryan Neil (please see Nov 21 entry), Harold Sasaki (Jul 8), and Dr. Tom Elias (Dec 30). I was basically asked to provide an overall view of the history of bonsai, put some of what they'd heard into perspective, and help provide a few more details of the history of the Denver club (please see Mar 18 entry), which was very sparsely documented/preserved as is all too common with most older clubs. The podcast came out on October 2, and I feel very honored to be part of this project, Bonsai Behind Barbed Wire. In July, Fumiya Taguchi, a museum curator at the Omiya Bonsai Art Museum in Saitama City, contacted me to see about getting a higher quality copy of the photo from our Yuji Yoshimura biography which showed Yuji straddling some benches at the New York Botanical Garden's exhibit of dwarf trees. This copy would be for use in an exhibit in Japan in the Autumn. This photo was originally given to RJB by Alice Feffer, a founding member of the Phoenix Bonsai Society, who apparently was gifted an autographed copy of the newspaper photo by Yuji. We were able to track down the copy in our archives and sent Dr. Taguchi a high-resolution scan. He chose this image because "it has very good composition and symbolizes the achievements of Mr. Yoshimura." The event, "Yuji Yoshimura, a Bonsai Artist Across the Ocean; New York, 1958," took place from October 12 through November 24 at the Omiya Bonsai Art Museum. The Japanese bonsai community was now, 60 years later, recognizing the contributions Yuji had made to expand the Japanese art of bonsai across the ocean. On January 16, 2020 I happened upon a post by a brand-new member of the Bonsai America Facebook page. Nikoloz Meskhi shared some information about his father Alexander, who was apparently the only person doing bonsai in the country of Georgia. Asking for more information that I could add to my Nations pages, I received via email from Nokoloz some information which I discovered did not easily fit into the old standardized format I had used for previous country entries. I've added a summary as best I could, and am now thinking of how to add this new type of data to subsequent listings and possibly updating existing entries similarly. Facebook and YouTube were in existence but still fairly new when I started the Nations pages, but they could not be considered or even imagined to be an early form of bonsai info/presence in a country. Until now. We will see what can be made of this... (And, then, what of Instagram, Reddit, and other technologies and methods which might also bring bonsai to additional latent enthusiasts now or yet to be born?) By year end I had put together the intial drafts for the Meifu Ten, Gafu Ten, and Sakufu Ten bonsai exhibitions. In mid-January 2023 I saw a Facebook post by Jeffrey Robson of the Bonsai Society of Portland mentioning two other shohin shows in Japan. Jeffrey had made and continues to make several references to our Book of Days project in a number of his posts for that club. I did a few hours of research and put together the initial drafts of the sparse Shuga-ten and Shunga-ten pages. To learn a little about something which is not widely known [to my culture, at least] opens a doorway to more of what this art/hobby is. How will these pages be in a few years, similar to how the Kokufu-ten pages grew? I look forward to updates and corrections coming to me for these -- and all our pages, always. On November 21 for teacher Ryan Neil's birthday, Jeffrey posted with reference to my Book of Days listing for Ryan. During the 24 hours ending about 5:30 am November 22 our website had gotten a record 85 visits from all over the world. I also came across a Vietnamese translation of Ryan's entire listing (including our picture's caption without the picture), without an attribution. I remedied this with an https://imtranslator.net/translation/ version in Vietnamese of "The above biography is taken from my website, https://www.magiminiland.org/Days/DaysNovc.html." The poster did then thank me for sharing.) On June 11 I went to the 2023 ABS Seminar held at the Denver Botanical Garden along with my daughter Angie and son-in-law Mike Bruner. I briefly met Jennifer Price and Larry Rangle. I caught up on old times with Harold Sasaki and Frank Mihalic in the vendors' area.
In early March 2024 I came upon a reference to the Nagahama Plum Tree Bonsai Exhibition. After several hours of research over two days I was able to present the first edition of Nagahama Bonbai-Ten, the oldest and largest display of flowering ume in mid-to-late winter. This page also includes an English machine-translation (with a little massaging/editing by me) of the Japanese biography of the initial patron of the display, Shichizo Takayama. Mid-August I added a page for Bonsai Podcasts, and then a month later, something I had been working on since the Spring, Tools. That same day, after about an hour-and-a-half, I knocked out the first edition of Accessories and Decoration. These latter two pages will be doing some significant growing and pictures will be added. In late October I was inspired to revisit my unpublished short history (originally written for ABS in 2006 before a budget-freeze, and touched upon again in 2012) and decided to make it available through Amazon's Kindle. Doing a slight update and adding hyperlinks to the now .docx formatted work, I blissfully changed it to a .pdf version and went to set up the page at Kindle. But they don't accept .pdf's. So I put it into a .mobi format with all types of formating tweaks, needing to download some 30 new draft versions using three different on-line conversion programs (I maxed out at least one). Alas, that format was deemed unacceptable also. EPU quickly followed and was shot down. Finally I went back to the Kindle Create page and -- keeping a copy of the latest .docx, stripped much of the formatting out of the .docx version and uploaded that. With a little playing around I got it to where I wanted it. The resulting version was finally uploaded to Kindle a few minutes before noon on November 9 -- and the evening of November 10 it became available on Kindle. My author's profile in six languages (thanks to https://imtranslator.net/translation/ with back-translation double-checking) was set up and announcement was put out in several locations over the next weeks.
[The third significant corporate history I've been working on is for my current employer. Compiling it since September 2011, six weeks after I started there, the manuscript -- with plentiful source notes -- was set to be part of the company's 50th anniversary celebration in 2021. The edited version has about 300 pages with illustrations. (A planned e-book version of the history fell through but is still very possible.) We started out as the Free Clinic of Colorado Springs in 1971 and now have 22 locations of our community health centers in 6 counties with around nine hundred providers, support staff, and other employees serving some 83,000 clients within our safety net with medical, dental, and integrated behavioral health care. BTW, this was our company's entry into a previous National Association of Community Health Centers' National Health Week video contest, published August 30, 2019. Our awesome Communications Department came up with the idea of a fairy-tale theme, I wrote the initial script, they put it into verse, which I then recorded. Our Digital Media Coordinator did an outstanding job animating this fun and educational video.] Occasionally I will get a random general e-mail request for updating of my website, SEO (search engine optimization), or the like. Depending on the offer I will take a look at their recommedations and pass: their suggestions for extensive ongoing modification of pages I would review and be able to make many on my own instead of havng to pay them a reasonable-for-the-work but too-high-for-this-non-profit-website budget. It is feasible for me to add a few lines of code to several hundred pages over the course of a weekend. Mind-numbing but focused detail work I can do in relatively short periods. No, I am not always able to figure out all the code changes, but I can google enough to get by. I have done this kind of thing several times during the past twenty-five years as I increasingly learn what is possible with my website and its evolving HTML code. Of course, some of these SEO requests are also just spam, as are warnings from the IT department of magiminiland.org that I need to do something or the other or suffer the consequences. (I really need to talk more with myself about how I run this show...) And, on occasion, I get requests to have ads or blog articles placed on this website. What I've been offered have never been even remotely related to bonsai or history. You'll never see any of those because they don't belong here. And the story continues -- along with all the other nonbonsai events and relationships in my life. (Please check out this newer project (started in October 2017): Good News Today.) There still are be a few other bonsai, research or web-related events in my past which haven't yet been included here. Other bonsai connection seeds, which I've been involved with during the past few years but haven't yet risen to a certain level of visibility, will be mentioned here if and when they do eventually germinate... The strands of creativity are like wide-ranging underground fungal hyphae which haven't put up spore-forming bodies yet. (Or as one reviewer put it years ago, this website continues to metastasize -- but, of course, he meant that in the nicest sense!) Again, this website, an ongoing compilation for present and future enthusiasts, is the equivalent of my masterpiece bonsai created by a small amount of work consistently done over a long period of time with increasing competence, appreciation, and experience. And feedback from the audience. |
