A History Of The Anime Ratings Guide...
1999
I was poking around the net and came across a site that had a nice timeline of web page screen shots showing the evolution of their web site over the past decade. I've spent the last few hours researching the history of AARG (the Anime Ratings site) to create something similar here. It's not much to look at, but, it's very interesting (at least for me) to see how far my web design skills have come. The archives of my web-site on the Wayback Machine are not necessarily complete. There will be missing images and broken links, etc. But, you should get a fairly good idea of how the anime ratings site has evolved over time.
I signed up with
GeoCities
on October 15, 1998.
My initial foray into web design featured various stone-textured backgrounds. This design was not particularly easy on the eyes, or, for that matter, easy to read. This design lingered for a few months and was eventually replaced with a black background with blue accents. The new layout made use of tables and was, in general, much easier to read than the previous layout. In March 1999, Yahoo purchased GeoCities. The following is an excerpt from a news report at that time:
The companies' shares rose Thursday on news of the popular Web portal site's plan to buy GeoCities in a stock swap worth $4.6 billion. GeoCities, which offers free space for noncommercial websites, boasts of more than 3.5 million members, making it the single largest online community site on the Web.
2000
There were a lot of complaints regarding the merger of Yahoo and GeoCities. Among the complaints, it was noted that GeoCities was becoming more "corporate". Despite, the reported problems associated with the merger with Yahoo, GeoCities was a good home. But, late in 2001, the neighborhood showed signs of change. I got the following message from GeoCities...Congratulations, [your site] seems to be very popular and has been receiving a large amount of traffic. Our records indicate that you're using more than the allotted amount of data transfer we provide for a free web site, which is 3 gigabytes per month (measured on an hourly basis). That means that during the past few days we had to temporarily turn your site off to keep the bandwidth within this limit.I spent a lot of time reducing the size of each web-page and optimizing every image for size. I hadn't seen any additional "love notes" from GeoCities for almost a year.
Browse through billions of web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is a service that allows people to visit archived versions of Web sites. Visitors to the Wayback Machine can type in a URL, select a date range, and then begin surfing on an archived version of the Web. Imagine surfing circa 1999 and looking at all the Y2K hype, or revisiting an older version of your favorite Web site. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine can make all of this possible.
Music 2001
For a few years, I maintained a music download page. Initially, I hosted the music files on the GeoCities site. But after I began receiving warnings about my bandwidth usage, I transferred the music site to a server on V3 Space. At the height of the music download site's popularity, I had roughly 70 tracks from various anime CD soundtracks.However, the after the music industry began tightening their grip on domestic music distribution, V3 Space took that as their cue to clean house and pulled the plug on my music download site. Since its demise, I have not bothered to restore the music download site.
The archives of my web-site are not necessarily complete. There will be missing images and broken links, etc...
Note: I'm fairly certain that the music files were not preserved on the Wayback Machine.
- Music (V3 Space) Archive: May 2001 to Feb 2003
- GeoCities (Alias) Archive: Oct 2002 to Jan 2004 - Post-Yahoo
Beginning April 2, 2002, we will no longer provide FTP access as part of our free home page service. Free members interested in continuing their FTP service are encouraged to consider our premium packages. All packages include FTP access, remote loading of images, ad-free pages, and much more...The black background with blue accents, which had been in use since 1999, would remain the dominant design until the demise of the GeoCities site.
2004
Early in 2003, I've decided to move my site from GeoCities to Verizon. GeoCities was a good home, but, they've always had problems with their adware. The adware problems would often cause JavaScript on my pages to fail. This required some extreme measures on my part to keep the site working properly (like having three navigation menus on every page) and made it very difficult to add additional functionality to the site. That, combined with the lack of FTP access and bandwidth restrictions made the decision to move easier.In 2004, I had moved away from an image-based to a text-based navigation system. I was also using far more CSS and JavaScript than in earlier versions of the anime ratings site. In addition, the anime ratings site had evolved from a simple list of titles and ratings and now included a comprehensive database of plot summaries. The black background in previous incarnations of the Anime Ratings site, was now replaced by a nice bright gradient and the overall design was greatly simplified.
Shortly after making the transition away from GeoCities, Verizon was hit by a rash of security issues. They responded by locking down various services and increasing security throughout their network. The resulting security changes caused a ripple effect in the user web spaces, commonly resulting in a "423 Error: Resource Locked"...
Customers may experience a "locked web space" error message when attempting to access their site. Engineers are researching the issue. There is no ETR.The issue was eventually resolved in the latter part of 2004. At about the same time that things were settling down at Verizon, I also started a Blogger blog (blog@AARG) to keep a running commentary of my activities. I was using one of the classic Blogger templates with links in the header back to the anime site on Verizon.
- GeoCities (Original) Archive: Oct 1998 to May 2003 - Pre-Yahoo
- GeoCities (Alias) Archive: Oct 2002 to Jan 2004 - Post-Yahoo
- Verizon Archive: Jan 2004 to Mar 2005
In 2005, I continued to push the design of the site in new directions. I employed multiple layers of graphics and a variety of CSS techniques to give the site a completely different look and feel. I also started using affiliate links on the site to see if there was any money to be made with my hobby. So, SHOP buttons would appear in prominent locations on the site and where feasible, direct product links would also be available.
As the transition phase, from GeoCities to Verizon, was winding down and search engines, such as Yahoo and Google, began to index the pages on the new server, I began to notice additional aliases floating around. The web space documentation notes that most web spaces have been migrated from the GTE domain, but, that legacy references to the GTE domain will still function. The GTE domain is probably a hold over from the pre-Verizon (Bell Atlantic/GTE) era web space service.
- Verizon Archive: Feb 2005 to Oct 2010 - Post-423 Error
- Music (V3 Space) Archive: 2001 to 2003
- Verizon Alias(1) Archive: Jan 2004 to Mar 2005 - Pre-423 Error
- Verizon Alias(2) Archive: Mar 2006 to Dec 2006 - Pre-Verizon (GTE)
In 2006, I changed the layout of the site from a bright blue background, featuring various visual effects to a format featuring different designs for the front and interior pages. Later, after a critique by Anime Cosmo, in which they suggested a more cohesive brand, I changed the site and worked to keep a consistent look and feel throughout the site. Also, the affiliate links experiment proved to be unprofitable, so, it was abandoned.
Eventually, by the end of 2007, I would consolidate or eliminate some of the core pages including the image gallery, the about page, guest book and, awards page.
There are certain design cues that have stayed with the site since its early days. There was always a list with ratings. Even way back in the misty dawn of time, when hardly anyone knew that that this site existed and there wasn't yet a Google to light the way, there was always a list of anime with ratings. Another design motif that stuck was the use of ball graphics to represent the rating. In addition, a design cue that started with GeoCities and expanded with Verizon, was having dedicated pages for each anime with descriptions and cover art.
The home page had links to the most recently added items as well as access to the anime list. Because of its size and because bandwidth was an issue back in the day, the anime list was split into three sections; A-G, H-N, and O-Z. Interior pages where specific anime were discussed followed a specific pattern. I would always include cover art, a description, commentary and rating. Initially cover art was kept relatively small to save bandwidth. And, sometimes when cover art wasn't available, I would just make something up. Or, on those rare occasions where cover art is not appropriate for the under aged anime fans among us, I was not afraid to ensure everyone maintained their modesty.
- Verizon Alias(3) Archive: Mar 2006 to Dec 2007 - Pre-Verizon (GTE)
- Blogger Archive: 2007 to Present
2012
In 2010, after upgrading to Windows 7, I found, much to my dismay, that I had to get a new ISP and as a consequence, the Anime Rating Guide was migrated to its current home on the Anime Ratings Blog (blog@AARG). With a great deal of effort, the anime adjacent blog was converted into a mostly anime focused site. At the time, I was using the Picture Window template that featured a handful of tabs that would bring the user to various key landmarks. The most recent articles were displayed in full and way at the bottom of the page was everything else.The home page link was always first, followed by the Anime List which was presented on two pages. One for the list sorted by rating and a second sorted alphabetically. I had a third list of things that I was working on, but, hadn't yet published posts. A key feature made possible by more advanced CSS techniques was rounded corners. I started using them on the Blogger site as a mod to the Picture Window template.
Later, I would add my own hand-crafted Related Post widget to all of the pages on the site. Existing related post widgets found out in the wild were not really ideal for my specific needs, so, I resurrected the linking mechanism from my legacy site to show the previous and next links in an alphabetical webring of pages. Keeping the linking mechanism up to date was a manual process, but, it was not too difficult. As a new page was added, the pages on either side of the new page in the webring, both before and after, would need to be edited to add the new page to their links.
Since moving the Anime Rating Guide to Blogger in 2010, large portions of the legacy content (several hundred pages in total) had to be migrated to Blogger one page at a time. It took a number of years, but, by 2017, I had finally completed the migration of all of the legacy content to new platform and I had taken advantage of New Blogger Templates to change the template from Picture Window to the newly added Contempo template.
The new Comtempo template introduced article snippets and would display a number of blocks containing a thumbnail and a few lines of text that could be clicked on to open the full article. With a bit of engineering, I got the snippets to arrange themselves in a more compact format that allowed for two neat rows. A year later, I wrote an article summarizing my experiences with the new template in A Year With The Contempo Template.
Late in 2018, thanks in part to the tragic loss of my primary backup hard-drive, I decided to document my Adventures In Microsoft Access as I worked to recover the critical data I used to inventory the 4000+ movies in my personal collection and the queries I rely on to build portions of the Anime Ratings Guide. Although much of the database had been reconstructed successfully within a week, some critical meta data was lost and it actually took several months to rebuild this data, before I could post new entries to the site and have all of the underlying web rings and related post links line up correctly.
In the aftermath of the data reconstruction, I decided to revisit the existing navigation scheme and the Related Post gadget in particular to come up with a process that was a bit less tedious to maintain. Since I already captured data from the site in a database, I thought it might be possible to build a rudimentary mechanism to automatically generate the web ring links, the related post links and the rating overlays in real-time rather than hard-coding them on each page. As it happened, the change worked reasonably well and allowed for the reduction of the overall footprint of the site with the elimination of some gadgets.
In 2019, I made an additional refinement to the design of the site to allow long blocks of text to be collapsed, thus reducing the footprint of really long pages. In addition, the Anime List was completely revamped. Formerly, there were two hard-coded lists on two pages, but, the new list can now be dynamically sorted and filtered on one page instead of two and even includes a pie chart.
One of the key features of the Contempo template was a sidebar that could appear and disappear as needed depending on screen size. There was a great deal of angst among the Blogger community about the hamburger icon and its attendant sidebar and whether or not they wanted them or not. Seemingly, in response, Blogger rolled out the Essential template which appeared on its face to be a stripped down version of Contempo. However, the Essential template had a secret trick. If you emptied the sidebar, both the sidebar and the hamburger icon disappeared entirely. I established Angel's Toy Box with data from the Anime Ratings site to test out cutting-edge ideas in private before rolling them out to the public.
In 2020, I revisited the mechanism for two-column layout in the Contempo template and expanded it to a Multi-column Format using mostly CSS. In 2021, Blogger Completely Revamped the Backend Interface, causing many things to break. As the Blogger team worked to address the community's concerns about the new backend, there wasn't a lot of activity on the site as I was busy putting out fires as various pieces of my site broke under the strain of change. Early in 2022, I disabled all comments on the site...
2026
In 2026, upon my return, I decided to Upgrade the Anime List again, this time adding automation. The update process was previously a bit more involved, requiring that I manually update the anime list web page in addition to the dataset. Now, once the dataset is changed, the graphs and tables automatically reflect the updated dataset. While, I was changing the code base, I reviewed the existing code and made extensive changes to streamline the inner workings of the site.After being away from regular work on the site for years, I've gone through every page on the site and cleaned out as much link rot as I can find. Some old YouTube video links broke for age verification, copyright issues or other rights issues. Catalogs of anime change hands from time to time and sometimes anime trailers on YouTube get caught in the crossfire. I've also taken the time to review the webring data and visit every page on the site to confirm in which of the three webrings each page should belong.
I retired the Flipcard Gallery because it experienced some technical issues and it was no longer feasible to continue maintaining the service. The Wallpapers were also decommissioned as they had all become dated and had without exception, been copied by various wallpaper sites mostly without attribution. Also, I didn't feel a compelling need to continue to invest resources into new wallpapers.
The eye image in the header is now animated. While I was renovating, the footer received a complete makeover. Instead of just a few links at the bottom of the page, I now have a full-width footer complete with animated wave background that I've been drooling over for a while. I've finally found one that actually works in my existing framework. I've increased the number of links at the bottom of the page to account for not having a sidebar anymore after exercising the Nuclear Option.
Behind the scenes, I've switched from Notepad as my primary programming interface to Visual Studio. Since it was free for personal use, it has already paid for itself by finding some errors that I hadn't noticed and by helpfully pointing out certain CSS rules that were in conflict with one another. Having new software for programming came just in time as I passed 4000 lines of code representing all of the mods made to the stock Contempo template.
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