Site Related

I am currently losing to zzeroparticle of Anime Instrumentality in my 2nd round match of the current Aniblog Tourney (zzero’s 120 votes to my 43, as of 5/21 12:30PM PDT) and I’m okay with that because I know I haven’t been doing the best job with this blog and I also like zzero’s stuff. I was a little surprised when the seedings came out and I was seeded 21st with a first-round bye – I think the age of posts might have been a factor in that. I don’t recall who said this when the tournament began but it’s an opportunity for me to look critically at my own operation and determine how I can improve the look and the content.

In the comments section of the match post (where you can vote for this blog if you’d like until May 24, I think), there were some remarks pointing out things that I already knew.

Canne: Without any hesitation, I voted for zzeroparticle because of the blog’s shear quality. I actually think Nigorimasen is good, too. I just don’t like the orange letters -_- #

Baka-Raptor: I like AI a lot. I ended up voting for it, but I gave Nigorimasen very serious consideration even though I’ve never read it before. The deal-breaker was that Nigorimasen does a lot of industry posts, which has even less to do with anime than anime music. #

Josh on his eponymous Anime Blog has been writing about his choices in each matchup and said my content was fine but my design was quirky and my post rate was not so good (here’s an earlier post by Josh explaining his criteria):

Design: Is it just me, or is the background for the entire page on Nigorimasen! gray?  Also, while it’s not a big deal, I kind of always disliked pages shoved off to one side of the screen or another instead of being centered.  And the gray thing is bothering me.  Anime Instrumentality may not be the slickest looking blog out there, but there isn’t really anything particularly bad about it.  Winner: Anime Instrumentality

Post Rate/Style: On post rate, Nigorimasen! has posted only 10 times since the first of March, if my count is correct.  That’s less than once a week, which is clearly in my danger category.  Otherwise, I don’t see anything particularly wrong with their post style.  Anime Instrumentality also has an issue with posting a lot, though they did decent in March, and it seems to be better than Nigorimasen! in any case.  Though, I guess when one is writing mostly about anime OSTs, you can only write posts so often too.  I also like how they have music samples intermixed in their posts.  Winner: Anime Instrumentality

Content: I think Nigorimasen has a lot of good, well written content on his blog, especially about the CPM situation. He just doesn’t post a lot.  Meanwhile, Anime Instrumentality is able to write quite a bit, despite being a blog about OSTs…and they have samples!  I think this category is very close, but it goes to AI by a nose. Winner: Anime Instrumentality

Overall: Another sweep.  I think Nigorimasen’s lack of posting and quirky design really hurt it.

Winner: Anime Instrumentality

The current blog design is not ideal – I’ve crudely coded the CSS to allow for a wider, er, width and the left alignment is off a bit, which bugged me initially and I seem to have gotten used to over the past several months. The orange color for links is a conscious choice because I didn’t feel like settling for the standard blue or black. It’s also an attempt to grab people’s attention but I suppose a well-styled overall design would do a better job of that than just the text color. The gray background is intended to be not as bright as a white background and hopefully improve visual readability but I can understand if it bothers some people.

The lack of regular posting is primarily due to a diminished fire-burning-within-me motivation to read/watch things quickly & then write about them (mainly caused by now having a day job) and secondarily, not wanting to just write commentary on many news stories where I don’t have too much to add to the existing posts that have already been written by others.

While writing this, I looked back to a post I wrote last June about my belated 3-year “aniblogiversary” (last Friday was my four-year anniversary – yay!) and saw that I didn’t “feel like I’m an A-list aniblogger” and know what, that’s not a bad thing. I don’t want to write things I’m not proud of. The lack of comments on some posts still occasionally bothers me, though.

Closing out and coming back to design, the harder of the two areas to fix – readers: do you have any suggestions on how I can improve the aesthetics of the blog, e.g. switch to a black background? How about banner content or other features? Feel free to suggest improvements to the written content as well.