Have a Merry Christmas!

I know I haven’t been very active on my blog for a while, but I still wanted to wish people a Merry Christmas today. And may everyone have a great 2012 as well.

Yep, that’s right, this is version 10 of Josh’s Anime Blog. I hope you like the new design. Some of my new versions have been big changes, some have been small. This is somewhere in between I think.  The general design of the site hasn’t actually changed too much.  The main outwardly differences have been moving the blog title from the image to the space above the image and, obviously, the change in the colors.

The backend has seen a larger change, moving from using thematic as the base theme to using twenty eleven as the base theme.  This ended up being a challenge because I had to convert my stylesheets from styling XHTML to HTML5, and the fact that twenty eleven isn’t quite as vanilla as thematic, so there were some styles I had to override that weren’t there in thematic.  However, twenty eleven does have some plusses as well.

In any case, if you notice anything out of wack on the new design, please let me know. I tried to check everything before activating it, but I could have easily missed something. One thing I have noticed…and I’m not sure how to fix it or if I can fix it, is that, because of the Caching issue, the same header image is showing everywhere despite being set to random.  Not really sure that’s a big problem, but I did notice it.  In any case, I hope you enjoy the new design.

One always has to love it – get a couple weeks off. You think “hey! I’ll have tons of time to catch up on anime!”  Except it’s not that easy when one is spending the time with family over Christmas and New Year.  And so, total number of anime episodes watched while off from work: 1.  And not even a show I was currently blogging.

Luckily my backlog isn’t too horrible (only about 1 month’s worth) so I hopefully should be caught up in not too long.  Football season ending should help as well.  Also, my blog was apparently hacked sometime during my break.  Based on twitter and google, it probably happened within the past week or so.  I’m not sure what happened, but thanks to doing a full backup when I had to reinstall Vista not too long ago, and my blog emailing me automatic DB backups every week, nothing was lost.

So I should be catching up on blogging here hopefully over the next week.  Oh, and go J.E.T.S. Jets Jets Jets tomorrow.

No, I haven’t abandoned this blog already.  I have three things I’m currently watching which I’ll hopefully post about soon (Gurren Lagann disc 2 and Now and Then, Here and There are the main two).  However, I did want to make a quick update, since I do administer the site.

For a while I’ve “maintained” (maintained being in quotes because I haven’t really done anything with it for a while other than keep it online) a DNA² Wiki at http://www.dna2.info.  Well, I’m getting rid of the host that that wiki is being hosted on, mainly because I’m not really maintaining any of the sites.  As a result, I’m in the process of moving everything that is on the soon-to-be-delated dna2.info and moving it to http://dna2.wikia.com.  In the process, I’ll also try to add more information and make some improvements to the wiki, though a lot of the information was already there and, given that the series came out something like 15 years ago, hasn’t really changed all that much in the meantime.  However, if anyone wishes to add to what I’ve posted on there so far, feel free to.  Part of the reason I haven’t posted as much is that I’m moving some of the other stuff that I have hosted on the domain to a WAMP server on my computer, since I was really only using the PHP and MySQL database available as part of the hosting for stuff I was personally doing, and that stuff I can do easily enough on my computer.

I’m not really sure how many people care about that, but I thought I would post a note about it anyway.

Alright, I’m once again taking this blog back off life support (or, is it putting it back on life support after it flat-lined…again), this time with hopefully a somewhat new strategy as far as blogging.

Instead of doing lengthy episode reviews with several paragraphs and a big gallery of pictures, I think I’ll do reviews of…well…pretty much everything – episodes, DVDs, online episodes, whatever.  However, I plan on having these reviews be more of the shorter nature – instead of 24 pictures and 6 or 8 paragraphs or whatever it was before, I’m going to try to make them 1 picture and maybe only 2 or 3 paragraph, depending on the length of item I’m reviewing.

I’m also “clearing the slate” if you will, as far as old series.  What I mean by that is that I’m going to allow myself to talk about/review/whatever series I have already reviewed in the past.  I’ll keep all my old reviews and posts up as a sort of archive, but just because I’ve already reviewed, say, Kanon, doesn’t mean I might not go through and review it disk by disk as I rewatch it in the future.

That kind of brings me back to: what am I reviewing.  I kind of said what above, but to be more specific, I’m restarting my Netflix subscription so I can get DVDs that way again.  DVDs I get through there is one source I will write reviews from.  If I stream episodes online from Netflix (or Funimation or Crunchyroll for that matter), that is another source.  DVDs I own will be another, and then on top of this, new anime episodes currently airing in Japan.

With the exception of newly aired episodes (probably, though there might be exceptions, especially if I get behind), I’ll probably review episodes 4 to 6 at a time, whether that’s because that’s how many are on a DVD or just because I’m just taking them as such a group when watching them online.

This will let me do a few things

1) Actually write about series I’m currently watching without waiting until the very end.  One problem I had before with some series is that I’d watch it, but by the time I was done, I had forgotten half of what went on when trying to write a review of the series

2) It opens up the anime library that I own as a source of material for the blog

3) This still allows me to blog certain series that are airing.  Some series I might do an episode at a time, while others I may still do in groups of 2, 3, or 4 episodes, depending on the series.  That will give me some flexibility there as well.

Regarding other non-episode blogging portions of the site, such as anime dvd/manga releases and the anime credits…I don’t know.  The anime credits I’ll probably keep, if for no other reason than I like scouring YouTube for anime credit sequences I wouldn’t normally have seen otherwise.  For the new releases…It’s sort of useful for me I guess, but if no one else cares about it, it might be more trouble than it’s worth.

Ultimately, my goal is to post somewhere around 3 posts a week (hopefully at a minimum).  Of course, if there are any editorial topics I randomly feel like writing about, or news stories I see that I want to chime in on, I’ll write about those as I always have.

I had planned on renaming my blog with a new URL and everything, and while I guess I could have done it at the same time as this restart, I thought I’d do one thing at a time for now.