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!
The process was kinda like this…not as smooth as planned….
Constructive Feedback from Aniblog Tourney
May 20, 2010 in Commentary, Site Related by Tom Langston (calaggie) | 2 comments
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.
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):
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.
Tags: aniblog tournament, aniblog tourney, blogging, design, Site Related