In a couple weeks (or so) I plan on launching my next blog design: Josh’s Anime Blog Version 7.

Here is a preview of the page (for a fuller preview, as well as things to look forward to in the new design, go to the full post):

Here is a “fuller” size (though a few posts have still been cut out, but it does show the entire sidebar):

But didn’t you just redesign in February!?”  You might ask?  Yes I did, but then again, I did some calculations and found that I redesign by blog, on average, every 7 months anyway, plus there were just some things about the current design that I didn’t like, plus there were some cool things I wanted to implement and just couldn’t wait.

Now, what has changed?

1. Sidebar/Navigation

Perhaps one of the most noticeable changes are the sidebar and navigation.  I’ve moved the dropdown boxes that were in the horizontal navigation before and just put them into the vertical navigation.  I’ve also done some major rearranging of the navigation, putting the RSS links up top, and cutting down my page list to deal mostly with my anime and manga reviews, since my survey suggested that it was probably the most important part of my site.  I’ve also taken out useless sidebar items like “meta” since they weren’t needed.  I also eliminated the “recent posts” section since I had pushed it so far down the page in the new design, that it seemed pointless to have to scroll past 2 or 3 posts just to see what the most recent posts were…

2. Images

Not the images themselves, but I’m implementing the Lightbox Plus plug-in, and then telling my gallery plug in to use it, so that all linked images (see: images in my episode reviews) should all be displayed in a lightbox-like box if you click on them.  Hopefully, if people want to browse images within a post, that will make it a lot easier to do so.

3. Awesome cool CSS (unless you have IE)

In this design, I am using the border-radius CSS style to get all the nice rounded corners.  As far as I know, this works in Firefox 3, Safari 4, Chrome, and the most recent versions of Opera.  Basically over 70% of my blog’s visitors already use browsers in which these styles are implemented.  However, if you use IE (even IE8), you don’t get to see rounded corners.  You get to see square corners.  So either download a non-sucky browser or hope IE implements border-radius soon.

4. New video player (maybe)

The only thing I’m still on the fence about implementing is whether to stay with YouTube for the anime credits I post or go host the videos myself and have my own player.  The preview above uses the new player, since that’s on my test site, but I’m still not totally sure what I should do here.

The pros with going with YouTube is that, they host the files and they’re fast.  However, the problem with YouTube is that they like going through and cleaning out videos a lot, meaning that one either has a lot of old posts with videos that no longer play, or you have to periodically go through and try to find new versions of the videos (and hope YouTube even has any left).

The pros to hosting things myself is that, I don’t have to worry about the problem of my videos suddenly becoming unavailable, and I could conceivably use videos that aren’t even on YouTube as long as I can find a sufficient source.

However, there are two problems with hosting myself.  The first is that, my host is about 3 times slower loading video files that are only about half the size as YouTube.  That means you’re probably going to have to wait for the videos to load. The alternative is to have a video that loads as it plays and thus isn’t very smooth, though.

The second problem isn’t as big of a risk as far as the chances of it happening, but it could be a major problem if it did happen, and that would basically be some Japanese company sending my host a nastygram since I would be, after all, hosting the videos.  I don’t really have much of an idea of how big of a risk this might be, but nevertheless it is a risk at some level.

The video player is a pretty cool addition if I add it and it works well, but we’ll still see about that.  I might do some sort of compromise and selectively use my video player for videos for which I just can’t find a good source on YouTube or something, too.

That’s a basic roundup of what to look forward to when the new design is launched.