Link Categorization Exercise

Baka-Raptor's blog roll housekeeping exercise has spurred me to tidy up mine too. But not so much with respect to dead or 'hiatus' blogs; I regularly remove links about three months after the last substantive anime-related post ("I'm still alive" posts usually indicate imminent collapse to me) and put the feed into the Grave of the Hiatusflies folder of my RSS feed reader. Nonetheless I've been struck by the similarity of the rules of thumb used by Baka-Raptor and me - a combination of topicality (i.e. anime, manga and related subjects), social obligation (comment/link reciprocity or interest) and activity (hello world, i'm still standing yeah, goodbye cruel world).

I'm also taking the opportunity to have some fun with the blog roll; the general link category of 'Anime Blogs' has been dispersed into various categories based on my perception of the linked blog's dominant writing style (though categorization never pleases everyone). Well, not that my blog roll creates much outgoing traffic anyway. OTL

Embracing Google Search's tentacles

Broken search (my fault) was one of the reasons why the theme was switched from K2 to Vigilance. While things worked better in the new theme, one of my dissatisfactions with the native WP search was how it returned the same number of search results as the maximum number of posts on the main page (add: also search results were returned in reverse chronological order rather than relevance). The 'Search Posts' function was (somehow) rather better but, as it was located in the backend, it wasn't going to be of much help to readers.

And thus I was much enthused by Kabitzin's post on how to incorporate The Borg Google Search into your blog. Where the Sea Slugs! Triumvirate leads, the Holy Hontounia Empire follows. At least in terms of WordPress stuff. And, thus, I'm feeling the tentacle monster love.

on anime blog anchuluss

Belated response to potential blog mergers: We can't even agree to merge Hontou ni Taihen desu and hontou ni sou omou? (mainly due to banner incompatibility), much less attempt the Holy Empire of Hontounia's conquest of THAT Federated Union.

Speaking of Code Geass analogies, it seems that Ender had his memories of being a Sea Slug! prince blanked out after being hauled up before Kabitzin, in the aftermath of his failed rebellion, and geassed. Hopefully his C.C. will manage to find him and bring him back to us. Which brings me to another point. While I agree with Author about diversity in the sphere, there's also the tendency of teams ending up as one man shows anyway; I still remember Washi's tagline (LOL) which precipitated Rice's Alive post.

P.S. I'm surprised that anyone remembers my old blog name (even if it's with an extra 'l'). If we had gone for our alternative candidate names - "Chotto Zannen" for me and either one of two quotes from Stripey's favourite A Cab Is Fine Too girl, a merger would yield a really sayonara zetsubo name of Tsurai Zankoku Zannen desu

P.P.S. 1,000 posts!

Vigilante action for Vigilance

Hi, Zyl here, using Zaku admin privileges to post on Hontou ni Taihen desu. You might have noticed that HNTD has also been shifted to Vigilance.

Basically Stripey didn't have a choice since I run the backend of Hontou Ni and presented him with a fiat accompli. Though having the same theme increases the risks of being confused with Toaru Shima Shima Tanuki (and the possible consequences), standardization makes it easier for me to maintain the blogs and to intervene when, for example, a certain WP 2.7 vulnerability was exploited and malicious code was inserted into the header to load a trojan onto readers' computers.

Some readers definitely don't support the rebellion. Apologies. But we've had our share of problems with K2 - mostly due to me breaking stuff while clumsily trying to customize. orz

Current colour scheme samples the Tinkle banner. Black (#000000) for the background, purple (#660066) of the fence for the border, blue (#003366) from the eyes for the links, I've left the post and sidebars background as white rather than make them light pink like the loli in the banner because HNSO is very pink already. -_-;; Suggestions and feedback, esp if stuff isn't working, will be greatly appreciated.

Change we can practise

I have changed. Through encounters with others. Who have changed too. And so the theme of the first episode of XXXHOLiC Shunmuki was fortuitously spoke to me just after I just changed the blog's theme.

Regular readers might have also noticed that I've changed my blogging style since around October last year. From the ancient times (Gachapen desu!), my anime blogging really got going due to my Lunamaria Lunacy; loads of screencaps of Lunamaria and thoughts about GSD with her as my Most Important Chara; it was a style influenced by two now-defunct blogs: moyism's life line by line and Fencedude's Lair of the Diclonius. This style was employed to varying degrees, with notable peaks included renaming the blog in honour of Asa-senpai, logging on to Nagato Yuki, glorifying Athena, all hailing Cecile, powering on the Hinagiku flower and so on.

Pleasant simplicity is the value of Vigilance

All blog-tech roads lead to Kabitzin. At least where the Houtou ni blogs are concerned. I started using K2 because that's what Sea Slugs! was on. But I didn't dare to tread into Sandbox, mostly because I still have trouble remembering what CCS CSS stands for, much less know how to use it.

Kabitzin's personal blog has been on Vigilance for a while. And I recently saw a plug for it on WordPress.com so I took it out on a test drive and liked what I experienced. It was easy to customize (font colours, top rotating banners, widgets, tweaks to php for various plugins); I've also been smitten by the combo of wide/left/right sidebars. And while not the prettiest theme, it's pleasant enough to look at day after day.

Problems on the blog front (Resolved)

Every time I try to save a revision to a published post, it just goes to a blank page under http://hontouni.com/souomou/wp-admin/post.php...

The post gets truncated to plus/minus 350 words... T_T

UPDATE: Things are ok now. Looks like the problem had something to do with the highly unstable internet connection at my cousin's place.

Preaching to the UTF8 converted

With the dashboard nagging me to upgrade to WP 2.7, I decided that I might as well clear the UTF8 conversion issue first.

Doing it the hard way turned out to a bit of a disaster. It didn't help that the WP Codex entry was not written for people like me in mind. Unlike the WP Codex entry on Backing Up, there were no screen captures to guide the lost. The instructions lacked the kind of detail needed for those who want to be spoon-fed. Jargon and terminology were left unexplained. Overall, it was assumed that readers were familiar with mySQL. I don't know anything about mySQL - I did not even know the difference between a table and a column. orz

The classic entry that leapt through domains

I'm not sure if jpmeyer and hinano will entertain requests ('Mendou dakara!' LOL) but my now-broken links to their former blogs itches like bugs on my brain. Of course I'd love for both blogs to be resurrected in their entirety (UTF-8 problems notwithstanding) but, to most efficiently scratch the above-mentioned itch, I would request for jp's AWESOMENESS post (yes, the one with the pic of Nanoha charging in on Elian Gonzalez) and hinano's post where she complained about Shugo Chara rape doujins.

On a separate but somewhat related note, the most hontouni posts with the most number of hits (according to WP Stats) are:

• My post comparing the eyes in Minami Ke with a certain classic H anime
• Stripey's tsundere post about why he is also not a real-life lolicon