Wesley's Tool-Box

Naju City Hall has announced this morning that the city's population has officially rebounded to 100,000 as of yesterday, April 21, 2016, which is something I've been expecting earlier this month. Bitgaram Innovation City (Bitgaram-dong) has been credited with this turnaround, with the district itself reaching the population of 15,000 on April 15.

This is great and all, but I now wondered what sort of people make up the entire city. An easy way to see this is to see the population in terms of proportion by age group. The graph above shows this for each of the districts of the city, starting with the Bitgaram-dong at the top. Already, you can see that Bitgaram-dong stands as a complete outlier to the rest of the city. There are also two other separate patterns, one for the urban districts (other "dong") and the other for the rural districts ("eup" and "myeon"). To make this clearer, I grouped these in the graph below.


The rural districts that have about half the total population (50,138 as of March 2016) show significant aging, as expected. Much of the population peak around 50s and 70s, a typical trait of a rural town. The relatively younger generation, between mid-30s to mid-50s, tend to live in the urban districts that form the original downtown (population: 34,772), where employment opportunities and available amenities tend to be better. However, the dip in population between late 20s to early 30s suggest that the people who graduated universities and colleges went out to other towns for employment. Naju was sorely needing places for jobs.

This is where Bitgaram-dong came in. Essentially rooting 16 (2 pending) public corporations out of the Seoul metropolitan area and transplanting them into a new city created out of the bulldozed pear orchards and rice paddies, it aimed to revitalize the slowly dissipating Naju. Looking at the graph, it's clear that the employees who weren't too old or have children in the higher education tended to move in with their entire families, so you see two very strong peaks in the 30s and preteens. Considering future growth, Naju's overall population mix will shift significantly younger thanks to this.

Here's my thoughts on looking at all this. The influx of young people into the town leads the growth of the commercial sector, hopefully creating a virtuous cycle of new jobs and further population growth. The greed of the building owners need to loosen up, though. I already hear that the rent is too high. That's going to hurt everybody. One must remember that the metropolitan city of Gwangju has pretty much everything and it's only 20 minutes' drive away.

Meanwhile, the disproportionately large share of the preteens leave quite a bit of work for the civil servants, specifically in terms of education. The demand for nurseries, kindergartens, and elementary schools is at a record high and the city hall / office of education are having a hard time coping with it in a timely manner. But meeting these demands is going to be a big factor in maintaining the growth. After all, Koreans are very conscious, nay, obsessive in providing good education to their children. If the families get disappointed, they might as well move out, again likely to Gwangju. Let's hope that the authorities get their acts together and not let this happen. Naju has bleeded because of Gwangju long enough.

For the past few days, you may have noticed that the website had received further updates in addition to some changes done earlier. Most notably, I modified some underlying code so that the menu bar is properly multilingual - it'll show in the selected language only. In addition, the tagging function got Korean localization. But I didn't stop there because there had been some requests from mobile users that I couldn't ignore.

With a responsive web design, the sidebar that used to be always present next to the main page gets moved to the bottom when the screen isn't wide enough, most notably on mobile devices. Because of this, functions available on the sidebar would become hard to find when viewed on a smartphone.

To rectify this problem, I decided to make further modifications to introduce some of the elements in the sidebar into the top area of the website as long as overall design could be preserved. First thing to try was the language selection box. After much experimenting, it was placed into the menu bar as the first item. This would also be nicely shown on a mobile version's navigation, as you can see here.

Unfortunately, the navigation itself didn't let the user know that they could change the website's language from there when it's collapsed and hiding everything within. So I gave it a label, so even a first time visitor would know now.

Next was the search box in the banner. The new theme uses the one that triggers the internal "quicksearch" function. While this gives you a nice list of posts that you're looking for, it's very slow in reality and doesn't work with the tagging plugin. So I decided to replace this with the Google custom search engine, which was already in the sidebar.

With the integration done, the now-redundant sidebar elements were removed. This is it for now, but if you have more suggestions, feel free to comment.

The first time I logged online was back in 1996, via the then-popular but now-defunct Nownuri online service. Later that year, I was able to connect to the Internet and create my own web page, hosted on another service provider's server. Internet Archives has retained a snapshot from 1999. It was the direct predecessor to this website, and it persisted until 2001 when I registered the Tool-Box.info domain, changed the blog's name to what it is now, and overhauled the design.

Then in 2005, the website was overhauled once again in order to use the Serendipity Weblog System (s9y), a PHP-based content management system, running on my home Mac mini computer. This system has been able to meet all my needs, so the basic framework has remained the same for the past 11 years. Only the updates to the software and hardware came and went in between.

When the current website was initially designed, I targeted the screen resolution of 800x600, which was more or less the minimum people's computers could do at the time. It has worked okay over the years, but the general horizontal resolution for the desktop computers had increased more than twofold, while the mobile devices often has less than half the targeted resolution even as its usage base skyrocketed. So the website's design could not serve either of the platform all that well.

This meant that I needed to redo the website design. I had considered creating a separate design for the mobile devices, but the existing solutions did not work as well as I hoped. Then I decided to try using a new theme included in the recent versions of s9y called "Next" which used the so-called "responsive web design." The theme automatically and dynamically adjusts the layout of the site content based on the screen size, which meant that I only need to keep a single theme and don't have to fiddle with web browser detection. This was the direction I wanted to take, so I got to work.

Throughout the weekend, I analyzed the ins and outs of the theme, then I made some changes to the style sheets and the template files to create a faithful successor to the original Tool-Box.info design. The graphics assets were updated or recreated to better work in multiple resolutions. If you accessed this website yesterday or the day before, you'll probably have noticed the ongoing changes. That work is now done.

Going forward, I hope the new design serves the needs of the visitors for the next decade well. The photos and the Toon-Box web toon that I upload will be in a higher resolution starting today to suit the new design, too. I have checked that the website works fine with modern web browsers with HTML5 support, for both desktop and mobile. But if you see any weird problems, feel free to notify me via the comments.

Recent news (in Korean) shows that the population of Naju is returning to one hundred thousand mark some time this month. It's still a far cry from the two hundred forty thousand back in the mid 1960s. But considering that the last time Naju had a 6-digit number of people was 12 years ago and it even dipped below ninety thousand half a decade prior, it's a cause for celebration.

Seriously, the city hall is actually planning to celebrate it. In the meantime, I got curious and dug into the registered population statistics available from the Ministry of the Interior.

As this graph I just compiled from that data shows, the biggest factor in this turnaround is none other than the Bitgaram Innovation City, which was spun off as its own administrative district (Bitgaram-dong) in February 2014 coinciding with the completion of its first apartment complex. The influx of newcomers was clearly evident from the beginning, but it really picked up steam at the end of 2014 when most of the public corporations finished moving into the city, including KPX. Nearly fifteen thousand people have been registered to be living here by the end of last month. Optimistically, the number will hit twenty thousand by the end of the year.

You can also see from the graph that population of the rest of Naju have stagnated or shrunk a bit, so I wondered how much of the growth of Bitgaram City have been translating to the overall population.


For the most part, the population growth of Naju as a whole has been closely trailing that of Bitgaram City. The gap has widened somewhat in the most recent months, suggesting that some people living in the original downtown were more actively moving in to the new town. It still doesn't change the fact that most of the influx are from outside. It should be interesting to see how this will play out in the long run.