Chikorita157's Anime Blog

The thoughts, reviews and analysis of Comedy, Romance, Drama and Slice of Life Anime of a College Student

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Behind the Scenes – The Tools I Use to Blog About Anime (2020 Edition) – Updated

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Artist: rikatan

As mentioned, several times, I finally resolved my job woes and finally moved to a new place earlier this year. As expected, things have changed a bit since I shared my last behind the scenes post. With that, it’s time to share an updated version including my overall setup since mostly everyone is stuck at home. This should give some insights to new inspiring bloggers.

Note that I won’t go too much in detail with the hosting aspect, since everything is the same. If you are curious about that, read my first behind the scenes post.

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The Steps to Run a Successful Anime Blog

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Artist: mozukun43

A while back, I wrote a guide on how to start an anime blog on a virtual private server. Regardless of choice of hosting you made, you might be wondering, how do I promote my blog and attract readers to my blog. We will discuss about that in this whole post. After all, I have been blogging about anime for over 10 years and know a few tricks.

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Dealing with Possible Blogging Burnout – How to Deal With It

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Artist: 睡不著的紅茶

Since the time I shared my concerns about the state of the blog, I fell anxious about where my blog is headed. Sure, I have tried making some improvements. However, I still feel the bottom is coming underneath me as the pandemic delayed a lot of titles. I fear that this could be the end of my blog. It’s not too surprising since there would be less content to cover, thus fewer comments and likes. The thing that really upset me today is the lack of comments in my recent posts. This is despite the hours put into writing these reviews and even an editorial nobody bothered to leave a like and/or a comment. I became upset that I complained on twitter in several tweets today. I felt that I can’t let this go on any further.

Believe it or not, at some point, some anime bloggers probably faced these issues. When he or she look at other blogs, they have no problem receiving comments and likes. It does make one feel that the effort one put into creating content is going to waste. Of course, this is not the only problem that can cause a blogger to become frustrated and/or even quit for good. Instead of continuing to vent on Twitter and going nowhere as I did this morning, I want to share my thoughts in a rational manner.
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Anime Blogging and Hosting – Why You Should Start One On a Virtual Private Server Instead on WordPress.com

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Artist: ティッシー

Since we are stuck at home due to COVID-19 and have nothing to do, you are probably watching or reading a lot of anime. Yes, it’s probably a great time to start a blog about anime, but you don’t know where to begin. Should I just start my anime blog on WordPress.com?

While WordPress.com is an easy and free way to start, you are probably limiting your potential to grow your audience. You won’t get very far without getting a domain name. Even with that, the free version is every limited in customization and you need to pay $8, which is expensive when you can do it yourself.

Of course, this guide of some sort is the hard mode in any video game. Yes, Crow from Crow’s World of Anime did several useful guides, but I think using shared hosting is a bad idea due to my past bad experiences. Also, there is a big benefit of doing it of doing it on a virtual private server. Not only your site will run faster, and you will gain some new skills of setting the server yourself, especially if you are trying to get a job in Computer Science, Information Systems, or Information Technology.
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Behind the Scenes – The Tools I Use to Blog About Anime

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Artist: 世音

Since my blog hit the 10-year mark in February, I never wrote a post sharing behind the scenes. Yes, this includes the tools I use to create content. I think it’s probably a good idea to share the tools of the trade for those who want to get into anime blogging or interested in technology as I will cover some of the software and hardware I usually use on a daily basis.

Updated: Added some prices of the plugins/themes I use and added some more tools.
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Secrets to my Writing Style

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Artist: 夜織雫
Artist: 夜織雫

Earlier this year, Kai shared how he comes up with new posts. Personally, coming up with new ideas for editorial posts is usually the hard part since it requires some effort to come up with topics and remembering them. Also, I will share what I use to write and edit posts.
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The Reason why I Anime Blogging and the Social Experiences

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In the past few weeks, there has been some discussion on why fans decide to blog about Anime. It’s true that blogging takes time and dedication, but there are many reasons why people continue to do it.

For me, I have been blogging for nearly 2 years and a half now and I have my own reasons for blog. I decide to do it not for popularity, but to enhance my experience as a fan of Anime. (Image Source)
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Melative and Making Previews More Informative

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Even owls want in at this...

Preview posts always had problems for not giving enough information or resorting to “chartfag” charts that become outdated when a stream of new information comes in, giving the readers not enough info on when the series will start, how long, what genre and so on. This leads people writing preview posts without enough information and just making noise for the sake of it.

There is a solution. If you familiar with Melative as I discussed a while back. The advantage of Melative that Melative has open APIs and a open Wiki format where the info can be edited by editors (and users can create their own versions of their pages) and add up to date information. Lime is what the whole thing is based on, well at least for the open Wiki part. I have suggested a WordPress plugin where a user just enters the URL to the title page on Melative (in a certain format) and it would be replaced with the up to date information that is currently in the database that includes the picture, any context information (date of when the series will start, how many episodes, genres, etc.), links to other resources and of course the description. This approach is a lot more informative and takes the guess work on researching information on that title. This is how I done my “Upcoming Anime” page.

The usage is really simple. Copy the link to the title and put it in this format. For example

It should look like this:

With it’s advantages, there are some disadvantages. One of them is that the “melative-item” plugin will not work on wordpress.com or any other blog software that isn’t a self hosted WordPress. This is because WordPress.com does not allow third party themes and plugins. Second, this WordPress plugin is still in development and not complete yet. Although the chances of it malfunctioning is low, the plugin can malfunction or do funny stuff, but it will not affect anything in the WordPress database.

If you interested, you can download the plugin here. To install, just unzip, upload the melative-item folder to your WordPress Plugins folder (/wp-content/plugins) and use the format I demonstrated above to show the information from Melative in your posts or pages. If you have any issues, report them on IRC, #melative on freenode. Also, the plugin will be available on wordpress.org in the future, so keep a lookout.

And this plugin pretty much made chartfag charts obsolete… for most bloggers. Also note that a melative account isn’t necessarily required to use the plugin, although you should take part in it and ditch services like MyAnimeList.