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.

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).

reducing size of tables mystery solved

I have figured out on how to reduce the font size for tables. It has been bothering me when editing my main blog where it would appear correctly in the preview, but not on the actual one even after saving the changes as though I never entered it. In case you were wondering what exactly, it's "Anime watch list", "New anime" and "NewType Anime Rankings (June 2008)".

At first, it was something like:

[span style="font-size:80%;"][table]..........[/table][/span]

But it worked properly when I changed that to just:

[table style="font-size:80%;"]..........[/table]

(due to formatting issues, the regular angular brackets had to be replaced with square brackets)

Background for main english blog

After remembering the codes on how to insert my background and not have them tiled from the top-left corner, I am faced with a problem on what image to place there.

I have about 37000 images that add up to 12.2GB, not counting the ones I have already burned to DVD discs, but finding the one out of that many is so difficult that I would only bother with the recent ones (unless I can't find good ones there). I do try to delete the lower res if higher res are available, but I sort them if the higher res version exceeds 3MB. Sometimes, I need to crop or resize images, but since they are save elsewhere, those are not reflected in the above figures. When saving, the option to enter tags for images in Windows Vista seems to be missing.

I had put up a full sized background before, but this would cause people with mobile devices or slow connection take some time to load. Nice images that would fill up a 1280*800 screen without exceeding 200KB is quite rare.

With the current layout, I think that no background image with a colour that matches the theme would be best, though I would see images that would only use a corner of the screen, preferably with a transparent background.

...

The reason being that I rarely check my message inbox at Friendster, was that I keep receiving pointless messages faster than I can read them that genuine messages got mixed with them. On top of that, I have moved on to Facebook and my blogs that I hardly even log into it, including my main account there.

Anyways, I received this message from a Canadian guy in Japan who is about 15 years older than me. It's made me sad...

Title: _____ has sent you a smile
Message: _____ wants to brighten your day with a smile. Check out _____'s profile and send a reply.
A message from _____:
At first I was going to say: great photos!! And: You're a great photographer.
But as I looked through them, I realized: you didn't take these photos yourself; you just stole them from the Internet. I was very disappointed.
You're one of those: ganbare Nippon! / Utsukushi Nippon! types. And you lack morals that we have in the West. If you look at my photos; all of them I took myself.
Did you ask permission to use other people's images?
People like you make Japan ugly. Utsukushikunai!

Hmm, I kind of was expecting this kind of message, and it could reflect what other people who viewed that profile but didn't say anything. And what the hell does he know about me? So, to not make myself demoralized further, I'm going to not think about it and ignore this joker, but will remove images from where he might have see it when I feel like it. Those images will be at the photo albums in Facebook and are sorted by the month they were taken. In the meantime, some albums at friendster will be made private.

URL changes

Seeing that I am having trouble remembering the URLs of "Profiles and Blogs Updates" (updates regarding all my blogs and profiles, mostly here at blogger) and "Neverending New Beginnings" (English version of my anime blog), I have already changed the URLs of those blogs.

The changes are as follows:

Profile updates:
http://yukarifujimi.blogspot.com/ -----> http://the1iam-updates.blogspot.com/

Anime (English version):
http://fujimiyayuki.blogspot.com/ -----> http://asuna888-en.blogspot.com/

URLs for other blogs remain unchanged. The navigation bar that appears at the top has been updated accordingly. Old posts may still point to the old URLs and may not be updated.

dropping compatibility with mobile devices

Seeing that I was unable to make my blogs mobile-friendly (eg. mobile phone, portable game consoles) at the current state due to the multimedia-heavy nature of my blogs, I don't see the point of trying to optimize for them.

However, I do try to support people who can't install external plugins like flash and the following internet browsers:

• Internet Explorer 6 for Windows ME
• Internet Explorer 6 SP2 for Windows XP SP2
• Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista SP1
• Safari 3.1 for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems
• Firefox 2.5 for Windows ME
• Firefox 3.0 for Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1 and various Linux distributions

(the ones in bold are the ones I use frequently while italics are rarely used, but should appear correctly)

The following resolutions are also supported (the ones in bold are the resolution that I would normally optimize it for):

• 800*600 (4:3)
• 1024*768 (4:3)
• 1280*720 (16:9)
• 1280*800 (16:10)
• 1280*1024 (5:4)
• 1600*1200 (4:3)
• 1920*1080 (16:9)

In addition, I would be resizing the posts that appear on the main page to medium from small. Images that are hosted outside Blogger/Picassa remain unchanged.

layout changes

The layout for this blog has been changed to that previously used on my main English blog, which has now changed to a newer layout that I had been working on lately.

The main reason for the change on the main blog was that the old layout got quite messy.
On this layout, the old one had to go due to formatting problems that made it hard to read.

When the new layout was made, the Technology blog was used as I had to see what elements are to keep and modify on the main blog at the same time.

I do have plans to do the same to the Japanese version, the Anime blogs (both), but I don't plan on doing that now...

Note: The title banner and links that was at the top in the old layout has been moved to the bottom, though there is already an all-in-one drop-down list at the top containing all the links. It's colour coded (as mentioned here) and categorized so as to easily find the link without cluttering the rest of the blog.

Comment moderation

I have now enabled comment moderation for all of my blogs. Previously, only this blog and my main English language blog had it enabled. However, anyone can post a comment.

This means that anyone who posts comments of posts on my blogs would have to wait for the authors of the blog to approve (or reject) the comment. The only exception is myself and in the case of the Anime blogs, Yukari too.

The layout of the technology blog has been changed. This is one of the few blogs where I would test new layouts on in the current blogger format. For classic ones however, I can just do it on any blog, especially on the blog I want to apply the layout to. However, I only use it if I just want a text-only blog or base on website layouts I had visited to and make some changes to remove/modify stuff that would work at the site I copied from. Nowadays, I don't even use the classic layout despite most of my friends still do. The layouts you see on my blogs are heavily modified versions of the default layouts of the current blogger layout. (I still leave the credits of the layout I modified from in it intact by the way.)

making some changes

Realizing on how large the file size the images are on my main blog, with the blog title image alone taking up around 500kb, I don't think it would be practical if it would to view it on a portable device as by the fact that, on my PSP internet browser, the chase keeps running out of memory despite the memory conservation turned on. On my prepaid mobile phone the amount zoomed from 1120 to 8 in a short time.

As a rough guide, the image you see at the bottom corner of my blogs, would fit on the PSP screen nicely. I also started by replacing the memory-hungry image and temporarily put up an image. Changes to the Japanese version would take place when the English version is done.