The thoughts, reviews and analysis of Comedy, Romance, Drama and Slice of Life Anime of a College Student
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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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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WordPress 3.0 is the next big installment of the popular WordPress blogging platform used by the majority of Anime Bloggers. Automattic, the maker of the WordPress have been working on 3.0 since the early of this year and there had been some Beta and Release Candidate builds. Currently, they are very close to releasing WordPress 3.0, which brings a new array of features to bloggers. I will discuss some of these features that could be useful to the Anime blogger.
This only applies if you have a self-hosted WordPress, not blogs hosted on WordPress.com
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Preview posts always had problems for not giving enough information or resorting to “chartfag” charts that become outdated when a stream of new information comes in, giving the readers not enough info on when the series will start, how long, what genre and so on.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.