End of the year things

I am writing this right after publishing S2P64 on the main blog, so to let you know I'm not dead in case you didn't follow me on Twitter and noticed that I've never post or update my blog after a long time. Also, I know I've not been updating the anime watch list widget: it a pain to manually update it by looking through all the code and multiply that by 4 every week.

So, to tell you the truth, I have been playing video games a lot that I've never gotten to play during the rest of the year. The Final Fantasy 13 (PS3) game I bought is last played at some large plans I can't seem to get pass due to strong monsters. That was on first try and never played a new session. Then there are these games from 2004 too that I'm playing on the PC at the same time. I've too tried to install Fallout 3 for the PC, but I've never gone any further than the "New Game" option, when it crashed. This means I've never gotten to actually to play the game. I know there's a PS3 version, but I don't know if it's in stock now and don't want to bring out extra money.

Speaking of extra money, the TV the PS3 is connected to seems to be faulty as the colours have gone all crazy. I don't know where the problem is as anything on the TV itself seems normal, but all the inputs (Composite, Component, SCART, VGA, HDMI, S-Video, RF) are rendered strangely. There's another TV in the house, but that is a CRT letterbox that only has Composite and RF inputs. Refer to the right image if you don't know about this problem: it's not edited at all.

After publishing this post, I'm thinking of writing of the end-year/Autumn summary on the anime blog I promised. I've just watched OreImo 12.

Minor Change to the Stories Navigation Menu

At the bottom of each of my posts on the main blog with the "story" tag, I have been using the following format for quite some time.

← Part 59

Part 61 →

However, when I click between "Edit HTML" and "Compose" modes at blogger, this formatting seems to have been lost. Also, for services that extract my posts (including Wordpress' post, and Facebook's RSS importers), I noticed that the formatting did not appear as I wanted. To save me the effort of having to type the code again each time this happens (yes, I type the code manually), I'm going to simplify to just links at the bottom that is separated with only spaces and a "|" aligned to the center. It looks like this:

Part 59 | Part 61

I will be applying to this code when editing earlier parts that would cause the above to happen since there are too many to edit. If you search deep enough you might come across the version before the previous where the link for the previous part is at the very top.

New Positioning of the Post Date

I've repositioned the date to the left of the post as a separate area on the English version of the anime blog. In addition to that, I've managed to create a data area below the date that is unique to that post containing the name of the person who posted it and (at time of post) current Twitter icons with a direct link to it.

This post from more than a year ago was chosen as Yukari has not posted in a while and to show that the code is working as the large majority of the posts there are by me. In addition, I've added a small code to have those share icons (that gray row of icons at the top middle of the image) to appear on both the anime and main blogs. I obtained this code from changing the layout theme of the layout test blog to one of the new presets.

Insufficient Time to keep up

So, with whatever I'm doing now having little time between reaching home and heading to bed for the following day (weekend is for catch-up), I do not have the time to do much.

As you know, I have a lot of blogs dedicated to certain things, like drawings, technology, and so on, including separate Japanese versions. I do not have as much time now as the time I made those.

With my stories first appearing less than a week after my birthday in 2008 (it wasn't planned), it seems that I am doing it full time with thousands of words for each part in recent time, though I wasn't aware of it until I looked at the word count. Just to let you know, I have no plans to publish it in print, and neither am I paid to write. People I've met did tell me to do so or asked what it's about. As the author, I can't really answer what my story is about as I'm not really sure myself and no clear planning was done. Also, the amount I made from the guguru ads in a month is not even enough to buy a thing at a 100-yen shop or drinks from the vending machine. Also, for the jlist ads, nobody seems to be buying anything via the ads on my blog, so there's absolutely nothing on that one.

Incoming traffic into the blog has been increasing since my twitter account itself became popular, and strangely enough, image search engines that had text containing those of my earlier post. Remember though, I am only one person and I can't be doing everything by myself. I also need a life and can't be spending my non working/sleeping time at my blog all the time. I need to head out with friends, visit relatives, playing video games (especially that recently bought PS3), doing whatever my parents tell me to do, and so on.

Story 4 is hard to write as it needs actual planning, but when I try to, ideas for Story 2/3 came to mind instead. A close friend of mine gave me ideas for the 5th story, but I don't really feel like writing that. Not with the backlog I have now.

(Follow me on twitter (@takhsiru) for minor updates I might say, or wonder what I'm up to.)

Stories Navigation Menu and Shortening Links

With me wiring my original stories (not to be confused with the name of the 1^st story) that are now numbered into the hundreds, tags are not sufficient enough to provide easy access. The links at the bottom of the blog are obviously wasting space and the uneven spacing makes it look out of place. With reference to the Japanese version, it's moved to directly below the blog navigation menu and links are in the form of drop-down selection menus. In terms of code I have to deal with each time I add a new link in the old one, it's a lot fewer and less confusing: I do it more frequently than the blue navigation box next to it.

Relating to the above, links pointing to something that is on the same site (blog) the link is posted at would have the main part of the URL would be omitted in the code. Example: "http://the1iam.blogspot.com/2010/05/alternate-dimension-other-saeko.html" could be shortened to just "/2010/05/alternate-dimension-other-saeko.html" by omitting "http://the1iam.blogspot.com" (27 characters) and would still work, if it's on the same blog.

When I load my main blog, I noticed that the is a lag between my bottom most post that appears on the main page, and the right sidebar. It seems that the old version of the above-mentioned navigation menu is a possible culprit as the code of the bottom widgets is before the sidebar. (I have a fast connection, so this might unnoticeable at times to me.) So, since I have 110 links in that navigation menu, I would save (110*27=2970 bytes) 2.9 Kilobytes or 23.2 Kilobits per load. Actual savings is more as I remove the old version.

This needs to go through further testing in different browsers and operating systems. Known browsers that would not render correctly include IE8 and the PS3's built in browser.

Minor changes to main blog

The changes to my main blog in English include

• changing of background image
• increasing font size of blog post
• auto-capitalizing post titles
• increased spacing of post titles
• code for "by Haruka Takahashi" next to the date at the top has been replaced with "by [data:post.author/]", where the value of that is currently "高橋はるか"
• The "XXXth post: " is abolished and removed. Since there are too many posts with that, I would do it only on the 7 most recent posts there.
• Images now have white margins and gray/black margins around it to simulate a photo frame with shadow. Future posts and posts that appear on the main page would have images to fit the posts horizontally is reduced from 100% to 90%  so as to have the new margins & border to be visible.
• Posts and sidebar widgets text alignment is now justified (adjusting spacing between words in a line in such a way that there is a clean, even edges on the right. (Look at this particular bullet-point and compare it to the rest if you don't know what I'm talking about.
• Position of the date of post at the top has been moved to the right. Strangely enough, this also caused the post title to move up to be on the same line as the date.

An earlier change not mentioned: Link to the now-discontinued IMEEM has been change to my mobile-friendly Wordpress blog. It's manually synced with all of my blogger blogs, so you might see lags of new posts appearing there, and it would come as a big tide when it does.

(It's ironic that I hardly do anything to this blog that is saying the updates to my other blogs.)

Anime watch list changed

What you are looking on the left is the new layout of the anime watch list. Not only does it takes up fewer space, there's less code for me to deal with, which is what I look at most of the time when updating it. The colour code on the far left represents the season it is for which is:

• Orange: Autumn
• Blue: Winter
• Pink: Spring
• Green: Summer

Those colours are from the older layout, and are arranged by the air date/time of their first episode, with newest anime at the bottom.

Since "Sora no Woto" and "Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu" would be ending in about 2 episodes, I deliberately left those under the older format. (But the font change slightly due to the universal settings to the rest.) As to why I changed "To Aru Kagaku no Railgun", there was no other Autumn anime (of any year) that I would like to watch, and I need to check the formatting. As for "Durarara!!", there were already announcements that there would be about 24 episodes in total.

In case you were wondering what the older version looked like, here it is:

Since images for Durarara and Railgun were replaced with another with the same image URL, the new images appear here.

Random change

For an unplanned and totally random reason, I decided to change the layout and the icon image of my twitter page. I originally wanted to change to something with this colour scheme earlier, but it seemed inappropriate for the winter season.

With the end of winter, I'm tempted to do this. Background tiled image has been sitting in my documents folder longer than the time I had joined Twitter. The colour scheme came from screenshots of my main blog almost a year ago.

I have no plans to use the icon you see me using in the screenshot anywhere else.

Status of my vectors (15 january 2010)

I know i have been quiet about it lately, but the vector v0091 is
cancelled. In its place is a yet-to-be-decided vector. Reason being
the complexity involved, lack of time, and, since first started,
better images were found.

That is, if i recover from my sleepiness, archive my old files, and
done catching up with anime aired for the past week.