Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Re-arranging of photos

I am doing a massive re-sorting of the photos across all the albums at Facebook as they are increasing and are hard to tell what's inside without looking through it.

The images were previously sorted according to when they were taken (eg. October 2006). Now, I sorting images based on the event or what was in the image.

This can take some time to complete. In the meantime albums may be created/renamed and filled to the maximum (60 photos) to accommodate the unsorted images so that I have lesser albums to look through when sorting.

Note: Some photos may be deleted as I don't want them or are duplicates.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

updates to imeem playlist

Looks like I need to update my IMEEM playlist as I had come across songs I don't like (or liked it when I added it but not later on) when playing the songs randomly. With song count in that playlist currently at 384 (I know, that's a lot), I should go and remove that song as soon I hear it.

For your info, that playlist is featured across my main and anime blogs. However, my KOTOKO playlist seems to be quite popular. So popular that if you were to just type "KOTOKO" in the searchbox there under "Everything" or "Playlists", mine would be the first thing in the results that you would see.

Monday, September 15, 2008

problem fixed somewhat

As mentioned previously, I have only manage to make the post having the same length across all the browsers I use (IE7, Firefox 3.0, Safari 3.1, Chrome 0.2). I can't seem to get rid of that empty space mentioned without facing positioning problems in Firefox.


I don't know if I should apply this theme to the Japanese version of the anime blog due to problems faced and the fact that this language requires larger-sized fonts, but I have already applied the background images and colours to it and it looks better than previously.

As some of the widgets contain tables of unspecified width or elements like images that are percentage-based (%), the height of area where these widgets takes up varies.

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Major Makeover

(originally posted here)



I spent most of my time today doing a makeover to one of my most neglected blogs. It's based on the "Ocean Mist" template I found somewhere. The HTML code for it is for the Blogger XML version (newer one, where you can move widgets around).

If you were to look at at the above link and the above screenshot, you would notice very little resemblance. That's because I made the images of the template myself and edited the code so that it would fit in nicely. However, it's still not complete, because I can't seem to find the code for the width of the post as I had increased the overall width from 750px to 1000px. Because of that, widgets that are supposed to appear directly below the posts would appear in the empty space between the post and the sidebar on the right. (The area where you see "Yukari Takahashi's network" in the screenshot above) So far, this only happens in Mozilla Firefox.

Because this code involves selecting the "Expend Widget Templates" checkbox, unlike other blogs with the same codebase, existing widgets have to be deleted and have to start over. Of course, you can still copy the widgets code from the old one (with the checkbox enabled), but with such long complicated code, only an expert would bother. The alternative is to copy the HTML code of each individual widget and paste them to somewhere (like notepad) and then put them back after inserting the new layout, but you would have nightmares if you have a very long link list (the non-table version of my "New Anime" list is an example), unless it was entered as "HTML/Javascript" or "Rich Text" in the first place (for the latter, you would need to view it as HTML when copying). Stuff like blog archives and "About Me" can be added easily though.

If you were wondering what the same blog looked before the makeover, here's a screenshot that was taken less than 2 weeks ago:

Yes, it was that terrible. Too much pink/red everywhere. So terrible that I, as one of the authors of that blog, would not even want to look at it. You wouldn't even believe that this screenshot is of the same blog as the one at the top.

I should be doing the same for the Japanese version, but only after trying to fix the problem about the blog posts mentioned above and backing up stuff there.

PS. There also seems to be something wrong with the vector I did yesterday.

Friday, September 12, 2008

change of colour scheme

(there has been no progress on updating of my old links)

For no particular reason, I have changed the colour scheme of my main blog to match the seasons. I have no plans to do the same for the Japanese version which uses the same layout.

The current one is for Summer (green, blue), which is from July to September, but since summer will be ending in less than a month, the autumn colour scheme (yellow, orange) will be made around 22 September. Winter (early December) and Spring (pink, blue; April) too. I might do the same for Halloween (orange, black ; end of October), Christmas (white, green, red; end of december), and New Year's too (black, white; 3 days before to early January).

I don't know if I should also do a banner for each to match. The current one seem more suitable for winter.

Monday, September 8, 2008

update of links (update 1)

With due respect to what was mentioned here, I have changed the URLs linking to here and the Japanese version of my anime blog
at all the posts that was posted at where I had changed the URL of, including one of my earliest post.

This would also mean that the sites mentioned at a post linked from all of my drawings that I had put up would also change. To know about some history about what were the URLs used across all my blogs, please refer to this post. With this, I am now left with 323 posts to look through, down from 435.

Links to other places like YouTube or Friendster are unchanged unless it was mentioned as the nth account.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

navigation bar changed

Old:

ネヴァエンディング・ニュー・ビギニンッズ(英語版) Neverending New Beginnings (English Version)

日本語版 | 英語版 | プロフィルとブログの更新 | 技術 | Anime (日本語・English) | ゆかりちゃん


New:
ネヴァエンディング・ニュー・ビギニンッズ(英語版)
Neverending New Beginnings (English Version)
日本語版 | 英語版 | 更新 | 技術 | アニメ(日本語英語) | ゆかりちゃん
Japanese | English | Updates | Technology | Anime (jp/en) | Yukari-chan


Note:May look different from actual ones due to the border that came with the blog template layout that is applied only to images in posts, and the availability of specified fonts installed.

As you might have noticed, I have changed the appearance of the navigation bar across all my blogs. (except for the English Anime blog, which will happen when I do a major makeover of both of the anime blogs: they still look ugly despite the 2-3 layout changes) This one looks a lot better than the older version.

The changes are to relocate it to the area between the blog header and the posts instead of the very top of the blog (even above the blogger's navigation bar). Since it's already a table, I would just change the background from some kind of pink (#FFEEF4) to some kind of orange (#FFEFE2). Colours for the names of the blog (based on the original name and may not reflect the name you see in the title bar) remain unchanged, though I did notice that I had forgotten to include the # sign. Size of the image in the navigation menu has been changed from 50px to 80px. Links in English are added. If you were to hover over a link, a tooltip showing the full description would appear in the language you were hovering over.

As the colours for the links area varies with each blog (black, green, blue, etc.), the background for that area has been changed to white. The colour for non-links there has been changed to closely match the link colours but still distinguishable from links. Under the old colour scheme, the colours would look like a terrible mismatch if the colour of the link was not pink. Also, the fonts used in it (Meiryo, MS PGothic & Sans-Serif) are standardized throughout. I would like to put in some Mac OS X and Linux fonts, but I don't know what the fonts are and getting to use those OSes on a regular basis are are like next to nil.

Due to the length of the title for some of the blogs, the font size varies from long names like "ネヴァエンディング・ニュー・ビギニンッズ(英語版)" at 2px to short ones like "Injuration" at 3/4px to make sure it doesn't go to the next line at the size I view it at (full screen @ 1280*800). Same applies for the links.

I am also thinking of standardizing the image in the navigation menu to what you currently see at the english version of my main blog.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

changed layouts

The layout of the main blog English and Japanese version has been changed. The new layout features a 3 column layout. The former layout at the japanese version would be used for the anime blogs. The new layout is compatible with Blogger's XML (newer) layout format. This would make things easier to update.

Due to the space it takes up, if you are viewing the blog at resolutions smaller than the width of 1280px (1280*720, 1280*800, 1280*1024), widgets may be cut off and you may find the text next to the images going to the next line after just a few words. Maybe I should reduce the size of the images...

On the English blog, you might have noticed that I have added the new "People following this blog". Since it's at the experimental stage, it's not available on all blogs, including my other blogs.

Friday, September 5, 2008

redesigning of the anime blogs

Even though I had made changes to the anime blogs around the same time as the time I change the urls of some blogs, just last month. The layout actually looks ugly and I don't have the motivation to bother posting it. It's time for a major makeover! And again, I will be using one of the default (non-classic) blogger layout like what I have done before for easy organization and modification. (To view a sample that looks nice, go to my main japanese-language blog).

I may also try to make it look like the blogs hosted at Wordpress like what you see here in terms of the fonts, colours, and clean layout. However, the one here is using the classic coding and I have no idea how to create the modern blogger edition as I can't make heads or tails as to what to do other than codes for the fonts and backgrounds (sometimes, positioning of layout elements too). On top of that, if there are errors or omissions in the code that would not make it appear correctly, I wouldn't be able to save it and the error message does not explain how to correct it other than a general explenation.

Monday, September 1, 2008

upload of photos

I have recently uploaded images that I have taken between November 2007 to January 2008 (2007/09-2008/01) and September 2005 to December 2005 (2005/10-2005/12). Images that are taken in between have already been uploaded between January and July this year (2008/01-2008/07). The ones taken in October 2007 (2007/10), however, are not yet uploaded due to the massive amount of photos and the 60 photo per album limit at Facebook.

More images will be added later in the reverse order from September 2005 (2005/09) until October 2003 (2003/10) before moving on to February 2008 (or October 2007) onwards until the month before the month I upload it at. (eg. now is September. I would uploaded images up to August) Some months may be skipped as either no photos were taken or too few were taken and had been merged with the neighboring months.

All of these photos are to replace the ones currently appearing at Friendster and to compliment the ones at my Windows Live Spaces blog photo gallery (what a mouthful name).