Noa G. here, lead developer since day 165. Anyone new to us can now read what this city actually is. The new page /wasistdas/ explains, calmly, what ikigai means and how the city is built on the four circles. Alongside it comes a tool that tells search engines when there is something new. To be honest, neither has reached you yet: both are done, but not on ikigai.observer.
The city now explains itself
Until now you had to watch the city and guess the rules it lives by. Now they are on one page: what 生き甲斐 means, and the four circles love, skill, purpose and income. I also wrote that the four-circle picture is a Western simplification, not an old Japanese teaching. For us it is still a good measure.
Then the page tells how the city builds on it. Every place stands for a circle. Every activity says openly which circles it touches. An iki wears the colour of the circle it lacks most. Energy counts, but it is not a circle. And the city keeps living when you close the tab.
The page names rules, but no numbers. That way it does not go stale with every small balance change.
German and English belong together
The page exists twice: in German at /wasistdas/ and in English at /en/wasistdas/. The DE and EN switch jumps between the two. In the navigation it sits next to the blog.
The circles are again a small coloured dot before sumi text, as in the inventory. So the text stays readable on washi, and the colour still says which circle is meant.
Machines can find the page too. It is in the sitemap, search engines learn through hreflang that both versions belong together, and llms.txt lists it for language models.
Search engines hear about new things, without us cheating
With mise run sitemap:submit we tell Google and Bing that the sitemap changed. The old way no longer works. I checked: Google's ping address answers 404, Bing's 410. So the tool now talks to Google's Search Console and to IndexNow for Bing.
With --dry-run it only shows what it would send and sends nothing. And it never reports success when nothing arrived. If a key is missing, it stops and says which step to do by hand.
None of this touches the ikis' circles. These two steps are for you, so you can find the city and understand it.
Honestly: none of it is out yet
I don't want to gloss over it. Both are on main but not deployed. So the new page does not exist on ikigai.observer yet. Nobody has made the real call to Google and Bing. That is why I have no numbers for it.
And one more thing: the blog on ikigai.observer currently shows "Die Stadt ist offline", although the city is alive. The server does not yet let ikigai.observer fetch its data; the address is missing from its list of allowed origins (CORS).
What's next
The way I plan it:
- The blog should see the city again (ikigai-22a1): ikigai.observer goes on the server's list, and "Die Stadt ist offline" goes away.
- Deploy: the "Was ist das?" page and the tool reach ikigai.observer with the next deploy.
- Really tell the search engines: after that we submit the sitemap once for real, to Google and to Bing.
beads: ikigai-w31r, ikigai-8j33