Archive for the “Site Related” Category

My three year “aniblogiversary” was actually last month on May 14th since my first anime blog post was in May 2006. (Technically, I wrote the first two on Blogger but quickly switched over to WP.com for better customization options. But it was not my non-LiveJournal blogging debut – see here for that.) I was a little busy with schooling around the true anniversary date but now I can appropriately wax on the past 37 months and wonder why the hell I’m still doing it.
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Posting has grown infrequent in the past couple months and I’ve begun considering taking on an outside contributor. I decided to contract Ms. Excel as an investigative reporter after seeing her work in City Hall that brought to light gross abuses of power and wasteful spending by corrupt politicians.
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I don’t know exactly how long this was implemented (a week ago?) but Yukan Blog’s categorical annotated blog list has the potential to assist people in finding new blogs of particular strains, be they week-to-week episode chronicling, intellectual, humorous, varied in content, comprised of many writers, those of the Yukan staff, or yet to be filtered into a particular classification. (’Kings of Funny’ is gender-specific but its intent is understood.) Although I found only a handful of new blogs that interested me in an initial run through all classifications, others may have more success in discovering different voices that resonate with their prose-reading personalities.

This blog can be found under “little of everything” (i.e. miscellany) accompanied by the following, as of this writing:

When you don’t feel like watching anime for a while, CalAggie is here to deliver all the news! Not once has he blogged a particular episode or review any movies (or so blissmo thinks), so this is definitely the place to be if you just want to be updated with all the latest gossip in the Anime World. CalAggie is also an awesome guy himself, who started a Podcast a while back but is also willing to join the Podcast at Yukan if he can too. CalAggie is brilliant at wording his thoughts and his blog is really pretty. He also had an old blog some time back, and this is now his new one! CalAggie is a man searching to fill in his spare time.

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The process was kinda like this…not as smooth as planned….

What had been planned since the redesign has finally come to fruition: this blog’s migration to a domain that fits its name – nigorimasen.com for the Nigorimasen! Blog. I had trouble with the mySQL tables and redirecting links over the past few days until all of it finally worked a half hour ago and I’ve been updating links on other websites since.

Previous links to the old crumplednapkin domain should automatically redirect to this new one without a problem so you shouldn’t have to change your bookmarks and blogrolls immediately, although I would advise doing such activities sooner rather than later. There is a new header for now stitched from the BECK opening sequence and I removed a few pages from the top navigation bar as well as shifting the post tags to the bottom of each entry. Now that all the technical business is done, I can begin concentrating on writing content again.

Since today is July 1st (Happy Dominion Day?) and other bloggers are reporting their monthly statistics, I figured I would relay mine to exhibit some sort of transparency and let you, the readers, know where I stand in readership and how a single news event post kind of made up for only composing 14 other posts the rest of the month (for an average of 0.5 posts/day).
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This afternoon I finally decided to roll out a new look for the blog – it comes with an extra sidebar as well an option to shove aside both sidebars. (BTW, the theme is called Mandigo.) I’ll try to repopulate the header folder with fresh images but for now, you get the buggy from Pumpkin Scissors. In the meantime, you can suggest topics for me to write about using the Skribit box or update your Gravatar since apparently the comment system now utilizes that feature.

Oh, and for posterity’s sake, here is a screencap of the previous design. It lasted me over 17 months and hopefully I won’t get bored of this one because it took a while for me to find another theme that fit my tastes.

Last night, I finally got around to signing up for RightStuf’s affiliate program and retroactively inserted links into posts from the past three months. I also submitted something to AnimeNation’s similar program but I haven’t gotten a reply from them yet – I also think I need to include a banner graphic as my link so I’m currently preferring the simpler method of linking to the TRSI listing. So don’t be surprised if I attempt a weekly “this week in releases” segment in the near future and I’ll try not to be a total sellout.

Also: I have begun to grow tired of my current, year-old design, especially since I started using a widescreen monitor. Currently my blog is 800 pixels wide with the sidebar taking up about 230 pixels of that space. I’m tentatively interested in fluid width so it’d fill up the screen but I would definitely like a main base width of 950-1000px including one right column. (I’m also thinking of making some header banners that use “Nigorimasen!” for this new look.) I think both a left and right column would make the actual posts in the middle seem “crunched” and two side columns don’t seem too necessary but I’m not ruling them out. Unfortunately I don’t have a good idea of what kind of color scheme I’d want so I suppose I’ll try out a bunch using Kabitzin’s experimentation method and hopefully develop something over the next couple months I will be satisfied with well into 2009.

Over the next two weeks starting tomorrow the 14th up to Christmas Day, I will posting a daily reflection on a particular event in anime or manga that had a lasting effect on me in the past year. (Look for the tag ‘12daysofchristmas‘.) This effort will be part of the general ABC postings Owen mentioned in his post yesterday. I might include some of the anime I watched into the list but in recent brainstorming sessions, I’ve come up with more things I did than things I saw so I’m proceeding more down that path.
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Even though my Internet access right now is limited to use of university computer labs on weekdays and Internet cafes at the rate of €1 per hour, I am still trying to keep up with my usual information absorption methods through podcasts and RSS feeds. I was not particularly aware of the recent “anime is just entertainment” discussion that happened over the past week and frankly I didn’t really care about it. (My short response: anime is entertainment by definition. It is the viewer that chooses to see depth in it, if any in fact exists with the work in question.) Same goes for the “anime is dead” and “how does one define anime” discourse of the last month or so. I felt that if I happened to fashion a post on the above topics and those of similar ilk, it would get lost in the noise and not get read with as much credence or attention as the first couple people who chimed in. Though I probably would have written a “What are you talking about?!? Anime is alive and kickin’!” post if I had thought of it at the time instead of just now.

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If you’ve visited this blog the past day or so and clicked on most images, you likely have noticed that a “lightboxed” version of the full resolution lays over the page and fades out the actual page. I ended up installing the Lightbox 2.0 plugin earlier this week and have been quickly appending as many previous entries as I could with the extra image code. The main reason I did this was so I could post thumbnails of screenshots and let readers see the fullsize images without having them open new windows or tabs.

I made a decision to not add the functionality onto images larger than 1024×768 because I don’t want someone’s screen to be overwhelmed. So far, I have adjusted entries as far back as October and plan to be done by Monday. I hope this addition enhances the experience and doesn’t slow things down too much. (Posts that were written in the PTO days either have their images still on WP.com or Photobucket so they may load a little slower than those from January 2007 and after.)

A more cosmetic update is rotating banners, something I have wanted to do for a while now. (I actually got it to work with the Dark Ritual theme when I was still figuring out the initial look for the domain move back in December but the categories weren’t the way I wanted so I chose what I’ve got now.) The plugin I am using is called Header Image Rotator, created by Matthew Hough, and I have set it to change switch out headers every minute.

Currently I have four banners uploaded including the one with Edward that has graced the top of the blog for the past six months and I’m trying to make that total reach about twenty in the next couple weeks. More variety is better! One gripe I have with the settings is that the interval choices are Minute, Half-Hour, Hourly, Daily, and Weekly. I would rather have 15 minutes as an option because that’s not as often as every minute but shorter than a half-hour. Other than that, it was relatively easy to set up with a couple of CSS edits so my next task is to make more banner images!