update

Well, there are always accidents in life and I did one of them. When I try to replace the old URL with the new URL for all the posts, half the posts were missing. This meant that most of the recent comments are gone and the posts too. It just proves that nobody should mess around with the WordPress tables, unless they want the whole blog to break.

Luckily, Google Reader, the cache and Mac Journal have the posts back up. However, I felt that its just best to start over. Because of this preventable boo boo, I will have to rewrite some of the posts like Nanoha Ep6-7 post and the pages… but it’s no big deal since losing all the content will be even worse.

What I will try to do is restore all the posts from the Fall 2009 season to the present. I won’t be restoring any posts before then since they were junky anyways… In the future, I will have a better backup tool so that something like this will never happen.

Well, it have been decided that I was going to ditch the old theme and make a new one. The last theme, Wicketpixie seems alright, but the problem is that it uses alot of images and it seems to load slower than it would on top of the glitches on top, so I decided to gut the theme. We are still using the same banner, but I made alot of mods and tweaks to the Thematic Theme Framework with the help of the Web Inspector in Webkit to figure out what CSS to edit and all that good stuff. I managed to maintain the top bar from the old theme, except for minor glitches that I need to fix. Overall, the theme seems to be very appealing to the eye and also loads alot quicker than the old theme… Several seconds quicker since now everything is done with CSS, not with images and such… I haven’t tested the theme in Internet Explorer since it is the worst browser ever made, but everything seems to work fine.

Anyways, tell me what you think about it and I will take some suggestions… No, the color scheme is here to stay, so yeah….

Also, I got rid of Wibiya… so people who are reading this blog don’t have to tear their hairs out when they see that annoying, floating toolbar. And yes, this theme has threaded comments!

Update: Subscribe menu should now view properly. Something was up with the positioning of the menu in the CSS.

I have always wanted to update the blog style, but I haven’t got the time with my programming projects (MAL Client OS X and Melative Library), college work and spending time watching Anime and Audiosurfing that I neglected to update the theme for a long time. Now, it have been almost a year and I have decided to change the theme.

I didn’t want to ditch the current theme, Wicketpixie since it’s a very clean theme and I want it to stand out since bloggers use the same theme over and over again… I wanted to be different, so I just updated the banner, icons you see on the top and the color sceme. The image is obviously themed on Furukawa Nagisa, my second favorite character from the anime Clannad. I used my Wacom Bamboo Tablet (very useful and they are inexpensive now) to quick mask the whole thing to have a clean cut from the original image and paste it into the banner with some touch up. The graphics tablet made life alot easier to make the selection possible and I haven’t discovered the quick mask tool until I learned how to use it in Intro to Digital Photography, one of the electives I’m taking this semester. Also, threw in some snapshots with some effects and I was done.

The color scheme is now purple and it used to be bright yellow. I was getting sick of the yellow, so I replaced it with a darker color that is easier on the eyes… Well, it comes down to preferences.

However, if you compare this current theme to the one used since February 2009, it’s a big difference. It really shows how much effort I put into this blog because I really enjoy blogging on Anime and expressing my thoughts. Hopefully, this will be another great year…

The last past days, the WordPress Blog have been loading slowly lately and I have been receiving Slow Mysql Queries spam messages in my mailbox and unable to fix it since the blog have become pretty popular according to Google Analytics with hits ranging from 1500 to over 3000 a month (peaking in July). With the popularity of my blog and my desire to update it frequently, it have taken a toll on the hosting since this is a free hosting provider and doesn’t quite work as well since there are several other websites.

The total amount of vistors we have this month and counting the other months is 10,000 and close to 20,000 pageviews. When the blog gets even more popular, I highly doubt that free hosting will help and I cannot afford paid hosting nor I’m willing to downgrade my blog to WordPress.net since it’s too limited for my needs since I’m using various plugins and a advanced, custom theme that is used in this blog which WP.net does not allow. Hosting the anime blog on my own server isn’t a option too since the server is too slow to handle the site load I’m currently getting. I’m asking anime blog hosting providers to help me so I can keep contributing to the Anime Blogosphere.

Another thing is in my concern is that I will be switching to a new ISP, Optimum Online from Verizon DSL since the phone line is getting too expensive since my family never uses it and gets hit with high bill since we don’t have long distance. This is because the whole family and myself have cell phones. Not being able to keep the DSL if I cancel the phone line, we have to switch to a alternative since there is no FIOS in my area (town have FIOS, but not coming to my neighborhood) and DSL is becoming slow in general since it takes forever to load a Youtube video or download anything big, which is why we are switching to Cable. For my experience of having used Optimum Online before, they don’t do any traffic shaping of any kind. Once I get cable internet, I will get 15/2 speeds and I can blog faster.

Update: The website is finally moved… and took nearly 2-3 hours to reimport the database and reupload the images, plugins and the theme. If there any problems, please use the contact form and tell me the problem ASAP so it can be fixed. Note that it will take a week until this new address shows up on Google.

Update #2: URLs listed on Google and Anime Nano will redirect to this website with the same page you are trying to load. Have updated some of the WordPress plugins which wasn’t possible with the old host since of FTP file quota limit (6000 files). These include WP-touch and the blog is now using StatPress Reloaded instead of Google Analytics so I don’t need to log into Google just to get the site stats.

Update #3: Disabled the Captcha since there are problems with it which is causing the Captcha code not to show up, but updated the anti-spam plugin. Once Captcha gets fixed, it will be reenabled. Also, Twitconnect does not work at the moment.

Update #4: SI Captcha is replaced with re-captcha. Twitconnect is temporarily disabled.

Update #5: Everything works again… The problem was that the whole WP-Content folder was chmodded 777 instead of 755, causing the scripts to malfunction.

With the overall popularity of Twitter growing and use by many Anime Bloggers in the blogging community and I have wrote a editorial on Twitter and Anime Blogging in the past, but I have decided to take it a step further. Now, any reader who wish to comment on the posts may now use their Twitter identity instead of manually typing in the name, email, and also homepage every time you want to make a post.

This is simple. If you have already signed into your Twitter account, when you go down to the comments page, there will be a new button called “Sign in using Twitter.” A popup window will appear prompting you to authorize the blog to use your Twitter credentials (if you are not signed into Twitter, Twitter will prompt you for your Username and Password). All you need to do is to approve and it will automatically authorize you to use your identity and will take you back to the same page you were before so you can start making your comments. The sign in process is secure, so you don’t have to worry about your passwords being shared and your account being hijacked by a spammer.

After posting, your comment is still will go to for moderation if you use the Twitter account the first time. After that, you may post comments freely. Also, comments that were made by your Twitter account will use your Twitter picture opposed to the Gravitars for Non-Twitter users. If you don’t have a Twitter account, go get yourself one… and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter at Chikorita157 and also Chikorita157a (blog Twitter account).

Attribution Information

Fanart used on this post is made by 芭桜 (Orig Source)

In response to the raging over not crediting artists fanart I decided to make some changes. Most of the time, I will use screenshots from my anime, but sometimes I might use fanart. Note that I am very busy and I don’t usually browse imageboards… but I made changes so that you can send the artist and the artist page of the fanart used to help me to credit for their hard work deserve and also to save my time trying to figure out who made which image.

On the contact page, there is a new contact form. If you want to help credit the image for me, just select the “Crediting Artist.” After that, you must provide the following information, the blog post the fanart is used (URL), the Artist name and URL to Artist’s page. This information goes directly to my inbox and I’ll try to fix that immediately.

Note: Any fanart in the future that I cannot find a credit to will have a notice on it and a link to the contact page so it will be easier for people to help and find the artist and the artist page for the fanart. Any that is missing information will be placed in the “Missing Artist Information” category so it will be easier to identify which are missing this sort of credit. Once I get the information, I will add it ASAP.
Another note: The danbooru Image Board provides the source of the image that is uploaded, so it shouldn’t be a problem not to obtain the artist name.
Another Note: A new page explaining about this matter can be read here. Spread the word!