New way to display drawings

If you have been to my layout testing blog recently, you would have noticed that there is a newer format of the way my drawings are displayed as part of the blog layout. It certainly looks better than the earlier version with fixed sizes for the thumbnails.

Although unintentional, when you hover over the thumbnails, there would be a nice highlight on the empty space below the image when you hover over it. This was a spillover that was applied to the whole blog from the codes of my navigation menu normally placed at the very top of the sidebar.

As of typing this, I am in the middle of editing for the drawings blog. The widget of that blog contains all of my drawings instead of featured ones, the thumbnails (yes, I make those manually) may take a while to do so. Until I'm done with it, the older version would still be there, below it.

The Japanese version of the anime blog will only have it replaced at the same time as the blog layout, but there are no plans to change the ones on my main blog as of this time due to space constrains.

As for the colours used, I haven't really decided other than to follow the theme. It looks nice on a blog with a nice use of colours, but horrible on one that isn't. It is possible for me to use the one you see in the image.

what I'm up to now

Seeing that I am busy until mid-March, most of my stuff will not be updated for quite a while. I'm aware that the post on most of my blogs (except the main English) doesn't have any new posts for quite a while.

What I had done recently is updating of a forum, my YouTube Channel, IMEEM profile, and dannychoo.com profile.

As long time readers might know, the English anime blog was originally my main blog, which itself succeeded this updates blog. Anyways, that layout you see currently was actually replaced with an another identical layout, but was buggy. That's why you didn't see me changing the Japanese version other than the colours and images. The layout I replaced with was actually base on my current main blog theme that was used for Autumn and modify the codes to remove the left sidebar and making it look similar to the earlier. If you were to click the link at the bottom of my blogs that is based on this layout (basically all except the ones with Yukari as the co-author), you would notice it bares very little resemblance to the original as I had heavily modify it.

The drawings and anime blogs (both english and japanese) need to be revamped as the current layout looks horrible compared to my main english and technology blogs. Unfortunately, I won't be able to change it for quite a while and may not even bother changing. On the english anime blog, you might notice me putting up this post. The truth behind this post is that I want to put up reviews of recent anime episodes. But I lack the time to post such things and the time it takes for me to vector or write a story eats up a lot of hours.

To my friends: Forgive me if I'm ignoring your calls or can't hear me talking. I'm not good at communicating vocally to the point that my spoken and written vocabulary are completely different. I would rather you message me than to calling. (Messaging me to call you is still considered calling.)

progress of v0066

I started doing this right after doing v0065 on the 21st February 2009. Right now, I am almost done with the outline. Since the original is a monochrome image drawn by pencil, I had a hard time figuring out which are the shades and which are the outlines on top of multiple lines that could have otherwise be represented as only 1 line (eg. the tatami mat frames at the bottom left). I have also put up colours based on my judgment or earlier vectors at roughly at where they should be.

What I'm trying to do besides that is to redesign the character's heads, especially the 3rd, 5th and 6th from the front as the original was done in August 2005. If you had payed attention to the character designs of anime back then and now, you can see that the character designs have been improving. One such example is the 2002 and 2006 versions of Kanon where even though the storyline is about the same, the visuals of the newer one looked a lot better. Of course, this could possibly mean using the "cut and paste" method from earlier vectors or other source images and edit those from there. I try not to have it look like v0015, which looks horrible, but more like v0018 where I added the bottom half from elsewhere and modify the existing parts so that it blends nicely. Others include the head of v0007 & v0021, the legs of v0016 & v0016a, the eyes of v0035 & v0037, background of v0053, features images and drawings in v0058, colours for v0016 (again), v0030a, v0056, v0056a, v0056b, v0060, v0065. v0038 is a special case where the enlarged characters in colour, but cropped, also features the characters in full, but in monocrome with text over it, in the same source image. More complex I had done before include v0030, v0046, v0048, v0050, v0051, v0058, and v0061.

(Looks at the previous paragraph) Sorry, I got carried away. Anyways, looking at how complicated and how long I could take to release this, I may release several vectors numbered after this (v0066).

I'm posting this in the middle of the night, so I'm feeling tired and sleepy by now, so I shall end this here now.

PS. My YouTube profile is updated to look like my main blog. It actually looks a lot better; even better than other poeple's. The wonders of just using the colours, level of transparancy, and background colour....

URL of my Japanese main blog

If you had seen the URL to my japanese blog, you would notice either a long-ish alpha-numeral adress (xn--n8jos8fqkx000ci6n) or the name in Japanese (虹を追いかけて), depending on your settings. By default, it would display the former.

In Internet Explorer version 7 or latter, you would notice an icon in the URL bar like the left screenshot and may or may not display the proper URL. Same applies to browsers like Safari or Crome, but without that notification icon, though which it would display depends on your computer/browser settings.

The older URL (chasing-after-rainbows) now redirects to the English version (the1iam), which, among the 2 language versions, I would updated more frequently. There are links from there that would lead to the japanese version.

I have created these tinyurl links pointing to the same site for convience:

http://tinyurl.com/6b4aww
http://tinyurl.com/dffbs2

10,000 hits reached

Since I had put up the visitor counter across all my blogs at blogspot (except the 2 hidden from my profile) since December 2008, the numbers has hit ten thousand.

I know it's not really accurate as people would view other posts, web bots taking screenshots or finding pharses that would appear in the search results, and some would re-visit the page. Then again, my blogs has been around for many times longer than when I put up some form of knowing the numbers of people visiting.

The counter you see above it displays current number of visitors. If you click on it, you would see the pages that are being viewed and a map of where all my visitors where it is generally spread around the world. If you played around with the map, you would notice that the large majority of visitors are from Japan. This is probably largely because entering "とらドラ 歌詞" (Toradora song lyrics) in Google search, would have the post of one of my blogs appearing at the very top in 1st place out of the 242,000 possible results. The screenshot below is proof:

So thank you for visiting my blog.

progress of v0061 & what is going on now

It has been some days since I last release a vector, but there are a lot of things I should be doing now. Doing vector is like a brain drain than writing a story as I have to figure out how to colour a region. The craziest thing I have done is v0046, because I spent a lot of time just doing the leaves.

How long it takes me to complete a vector varies from less than a day (sometimes 3 in 24 hours), to a week, depending on the complexity/detail. But with life-changing events taking place for the next 2 months, it looks like I have to slow down the pace I am doing, which means even longer time than before. I may, however, continue on with writing my original stories when I feel like it, which I find quite enjoyable.

Changes made

I don't really remember what changes were made since the last update, but here's some of them:

• Background image changed
  
• Background of post, sidebar, and top navigation bar has been changed to semi-transparent. This is made possible by just replacing the white with a partially transparent white PNG image.
• Colours of the side navigation menu of the Japanese version of the main blog and the drawings blog has been changed to red/pink.
• Added "Tw Cent MT" as the first font to load on the technology blog.
• To avoid confusion or misunderstanding in the search results, (TVサイズ)/(TV-size) next to the song title has been relocated to below the name of the singer(s) as "赤：TVサイズ"/"Red: TV-size" on the anime blogs.
• Colours and table formatting for "Friends Blogs" (on both English and Japanese Versions) has been changed. Apparently, the outer border looks different on different browsers.
• Some time ago, I have (quietly) lifted the restriction of the posts having to be verified by me before the comments appear. However, I am still notified if someone posts at my blog.
• Format for the signature on my vectors has changed from

  高橋はるか
  2009年2月2日（月）
  nijitoki.blogspot.com

  to

  高橋はるか・2009年2月2日・nijitoki.blogspot.com

  Fonts and colours are unchanged. Notice the omission of the day of the week. The order may be change to fit the positioning. By default it would appear at the bottom right (bottom left for the older version). Older vectors will not be affected unless I have decided to make changes.
• I have disabled auto-play of the music player on the English anime blog. Japanese version had already done so earlier.
• If you haven't noticed, my third story on my main blog has "to be continued in part X" on the right instead of the usual left. Images are also omitted. Speaking of which, I do have plans to insert parts in between as a separate part. You would know if you see Part X.Y in the title or "to be continued/continued from part X.Y" somewhere in the middle of Part X.
• Songs has been added to the playlist. If you are wondering what number the new toradora opening & ending songs are, it's 489 and 490. (OP/ED for the earlier ones are 437 & 436) 491 and 487 are white album op/ed songs.
• "Anime watch list" on my other blogs are updated. I hadn't changed since the last few episodes of Autumn 2008 anime and now in the first few of Winter 2009 ones.
  

Change of theme and re-organizing posts

On the drawings blog, I have applied the layout that you had seen on the layout testing blog. I have fixed some links that point to the old URL links that are now broken.

As for the posts, I have changed the date stamp of the posts to reflect the date and (if available) time they are created. Due to this, dates at the post title are now removed as they are now redundant. Links to those posts, however, remains unchanged. For example, posts (up to v0054) such as v0051 was originally dated on 2 January 2009, but since the drawing was first completed earlier, on 30 December 2008, the date has been changed accordingly. In the URL, however, it's still:

http://nijitoki.blogspot.com/2009/01/v0050-20081230-30-december-2008.html

The parts in bold are the ones that should have changed. I could have created a new one to replace this, but it may get confusing in the progress and posts linking to it could become broken.

Changes on the way my drawings are displayed

Seeing that my drawings are getting even more messier as they increase, I have decided to remove most of the thumbnails of my drawings that appear at the very bottom of my main and anime blogs of both language versions. In the case of the japanese anime blog, it's at the bottom of the sidebar. Now, only the best and the most recent ones are displayed. The large image featuring the most recent vector remains unchanged.

I have, however, created a smillar one at the drawings blog that still display all the drawings I made since July 2008 and some from earlier, on top of the fact that the blog itself are of my drawings. The code for it was copied over from the main English blog before making the changes, and the positioning has been modified to look smillar to the japanese anime blog. Since it's copied from there, you would be able to see my comments for it if you hover over the image for a while.

Speaking of the drawings blog, I am planning to change the layout theme there as the current one looked rather plain. Previously, I wanted to apply it to the main blog instead, but I found the existing layout too nice to change (apart from the title image).

blog for testing layouts created

I have created a new blog dedicated just to accommodate testing of layouts. Previously, this would happen on the technology blog, but that would also mean interfering on the seriousness of it and, at times, fanciful colours, fonts and images would make it harder to read.

What you are seeing now is the result of using the same code as what I use on my main blog around April-August of last year.

Right now, I'm modifying it to use it there for the Spring season starting from around March/April. Why I'm doing this is that I normally change the layout every 3 months, according to the seasons since the latter part of summer (around September). During the recent few months however, I noticed that the number of viewers has increased. The current main blog layout is getting buggy with that quote icon appearing on an external link which would have a preview if hovered over. Also, there is also a persistent problem of having a pop-up (or under) when entering, which I can't seem to find it with all that lengthy code that makes up this blog (not counting posts and contents of visible widgets). I don't know how it happened, but it didn't appear on any of my other blogs.

I will be adding the current version of the navigation menu as part of the blog layout. I know that it's redundant to the widget version. Speaking of widgets, I won't be adding the contents except the ones that comes with the layout since they are very vulnerable to being deleted in the process. So, in order to visit my other blogs, you either have to enter the URL, click on links via my profile, or as part of the layout and hope that the link is not outdated.

I also plan to change the font to outside the "Arial, Terbuchet MS, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Verdana" font (typeface) range. I also plan to change the English Anime blog layout, smillar to the Japanese version. Previously, the latter was supposed to had the layout of the former, but due to numerous problems, I replaced it with a modified version of the main blog layout.