[Categories: Site Announcements]
Happy 2008! Updates, mission statement and related stuffs
First off, a Happy New Year to you all and best wishes for the twelve months ahead. For reasons I won’t bore you with, 2007 kinda sucked for me so I’ll greet the Hatsuhinode (I hope to hell I spelt that right) with something that lies between cheery optimism and “I hope that shit won’t happen again.” As always, I can’t resist playing around with the blog a bit, and I’ll be making up my mind as to what to watch in the coming season too. One fun little detail that I spotted recently was how this blog is, according to Google, the manliest site on the entire Internet. Go me.
In accordance with anime blogging etiquette, a random pic of a cute moe girl has to appear somewhere to break the wall of text. Conveying my ‘coffee and a laptop’ enthusiasm this time is the eternally kawaii Mahoro.
Blog Upgrades
A while back I sarcastically commented on someone’s blog (it was probably Owen’s but I can’t recall now) that MBV would announce a reunion tour before I did a blog overhaul. Well, they did so I decided to stick to my word and add some handy plugins and do a bit of general housekeeping. Some were inspired by Sea Slugs’ alternative contribution to the Twelve Days of Christmas, adding to a number of tweaks and changes to make this place a more writer- and reader-friendly place. I installed Akismet to help with the de-spamming; while Spam Karma 2 does a good job at stopping the spams, Akismet offers the option of deleting them automatically. This might not seem like a big deal, but after over 18 months (yes, this blog really is that old) of spams being buried in the blog’s database the backup file gradually became larger and potentially harder to restore. After Akismet’s purge, my backup file literally halved in size. Simple Tags does have a SQL data cleanup tool too, this time in the taxonomy tables; in addition to making the tagging (possibly the best thing about the WP 2.3 upgrade) easier, it even offers the option of a Tag Cloud template tag that is easier to customise than Wordpress’s default one. My Tag Cloud now looks prettier and even includes tags that have only one post associated with them; that was a bug that I don’t think anyone else noticed but I managed to fix it anyway.
I’m now signed onto Feedburner too, with the help of Feedsmith. This shouldn’t make much difference to you guys but I can now monitor traffic and RSS subscription which, if nothing else, is interesting to me and my ego. I currently have 18 subscribers on Anime Nano but Feedburner is counting upwards of 50! Even one person reading this makes writing it worthwhile but the number of readers and commenters is encouraging in the extreme. You all have my heartfelt thanks. To sidestep the More tag that I started to use when my posts became more verbose and spoilerific, Full Text Feed ensures that the More tag doesn’t chop off everything apart from the first couple of paragraphs. I didn’t realise its importance until I started browsing the blogosphere with the aid of Google Reader and started wondering where the hell the latter sections of my posts had gone.
To reiterate how much I value reader feedback and discussion, I installed Quicktags above the Comments box, plus the Gravatars are reinstated. My personal fave is the WP Ajax Edit Comments plugin - I don’t know about you, but whenever I comment on a blog I never spot the typos until I’ve hit Submit. This neat plugin gives you a whole 15 minutes to revisit your comment(s) and make the changes. I first saw it over at KT’s blog and appreciated the ‘check and correct’ facility so decided to install it here. WP 2.3 Related Posts is another “How did I manage without this before?” type of plugin since it lists similarly tagged posts neatly at the bottom of each post when they’re viewed individually. This and the eternally excellent Extended Live Archives ensures that my older posts, even the embarrassingly poorly-written ones from my early blogging days, don’t get buried.
Viewing Updates
Due to the shitty ISP I’ve had to use in recent weeks my net connection isn’t what I’m used to (BT spoiled me with their reliability and lack of suckiness that AOL exhibits) with a slow, asymmetric data traffic flow. Whether it was this that made the trackers block me or whether the pre-Christmas increase in online traffic caused the said shitty ISP to get stingy over their customers’ bandwidth, I don’t know. All I know is, Bit Tornado couldn’t connect to any torrent, regardless of age or activity; after several fraught days I installed Azureus instead. Inevitably the download rates are still such that I leave my laptop running overnight to get near a less selfish 1:1 download/upload sharing ratio but at least it works. The torrents are also listed in the same download window too, so I can download more than one file simultaneously and, thanks to Azureus, keep better track of how they’re going.
With this in mind I have a 2008 viewing schedule taking shape, which includes more Kaiji, Clannad, Mokke, Moyashimon and Gundam 00. Inevitably the second season of Gunslinger Girl and, when it resumes, Macross F will both hopefully appear here in the next month or two. I might watch Mnemosyne too because I’m a sucker for pretty gothic imagery and pretentious titles; ultimately I’m aiming for a more editorial-centric approach to blogging as opposed to episode batch or DVD volume reviews. The ideal would be a hybrid of both, but above all else I want to keep quality of writing over quantity. Even now I’m never 100% satisfied with what I write, and want to keep pushing my abilities in order to improve. If I’m to have any hope of my own writing being on a par with the posts I read on others’ blogs, I’ll have to make my posting less frequent. Hopefully going down to a maximum of, say, two posts a week will improve the quality; although I’ll be churning out less, the plan is that what I do write will be more informative, interesting to read and generally better-written. Wish me luck!
Posted on January 1st, 2008 @ 4:34 pm
I recall that comment!
For the record I’d definitely welcome less posts from you, but only because the amount of time on average that I take to pore over a post of yours in order to do it justice, when juxtaposed with the numerous other posts that I read daily can only mean that my “burden” is lessened somewhat. Keep up the good work.
You might want to try out Deluge as a torrent client if you’re experiencing problems with your torrents, as I’ve been using it lately and it’s certainly something. Having lived with decidedly Nazi traffic shaping methods from my ISP for some time now, being able to download at full speeds is amazing. Hope this alleviates your predicament somewhat. It’s a no-frills client, but it gets the job done.
Also, now that you’ve listed them all out, your plugins bear remarkable similarity to mine, sans the comment editing one. Not like that’s a bad thing, though. It’s been great blogging alongside you, and here’s to many awesome posts.
Happy New Year!
Posted on January 1st, 2008 @ 6:44 pm
This is most definitely a metablog post, In which half I don’t fully understand. Anyhow, Hope you have a better year this year.
Posted on January 1st, 2008 @ 8:26 pm
Should I point out that your blog is only the manliest if you spell ‘huerrgh’ with two or three ‘r’s? Probably not.
I look forward to reading more from The End of the World.
Posted on January 1st, 2008 @ 11:39 pm
The way you describe Feedburner makes it sound very interesting. I’ve always wondered just how many people use RSS, so I may well follow your lead and switch over.
Anyway, I think you’ve definitely improved as a writer/blogger during 2007. Not necessarily in terms of technical quality, but your writing style seems to have matured and seems more… confident? Just looking through your front page, it looks like you’ve posted something new almost every day, that’s a pretty great achievement considering the quality on offer.
Happy new year, Martin.
Posted on January 2nd, 2008 @ 3:59 am
LOL, looks like Hige is right up there with you on the manly scale, with Guff and me a bit lower. Hmm…sounds about right, I guess.
Anyway, good stuff with the upgrades! Also (suddenly noticing) whoa is that a Gurren Flagann icon to the right there? Oh ok, it’s that UK aggregator.
Posted on January 2nd, 2008 @ 6:01 pm
@Owen: Yeah, that was the comment. I ended up buying a ticket to one of the upcoming shows too…I’m looking forward to it. As for the posting regularity, I’m running the risk of spreading myself too thin - the likes of T.H.A.T. and Anime Diet have the advantage of multiple writers but when I’m on my own and out in the scary world of full time work, it’s not really sustainable. Cheers for the link to Deluge - I might give it a try if the ul/dl speeds don’t improve.
@Jayme: yep, it’s a metablog post! Happy new year anyways. ^_^
@IKnight: I’m not sure if the number of r’s denotes a degree of manliness…it might be worth researching!
@bateszi: I only heard about Feedburner recently but it’s a free service and the stats are quite interesting. Feed readers seem to be more popular these days so I reckon it’s a useful thing to have. As for my blogging in general, getting a bit more involved in the blogosphere has helped immensely - although some of the ABC stunts took a bit of flak sometimes, it’s been great to bounce ideas of one another and the overall results have been positive.
@Orion: ah, the Gurren Flagann. The AUKN aggregator didn’t have an icon of its own so I hurriedly knocked one together on Fireworks. Hige’s up in Scotland somewhere iirc so I guess they breed ‘em tough up there!