Activity Log
October 7, 2026
Update
Added a secret page with nothing on it, so I can stare at the background animations. There was a lot of back and forth trying to pick the right link for the page. Settled on a large semi-transparent dot under the about me link. And I added a bit of script to change the blog name on that page, so, there was no excuse to even have a page title. The blog name area just says: Nothing To See Here.
After some digging, I finally found a CSS-based wave effect that I've been drooling over for a while that works with my crazy architecture. I needed a version that didn't rely heavily on hooks into the page's BODY or the HTML tag itself. The one I found is just a set of DIVs and some CSS. I have no idea what it does or how it works, but, it does work. The only changes I made to the basic code were to place the animation and the footer content on different layers (z-index) and to lighten the colors a bit. While I was poking around the footer, I found and fixed an issue with the Sidebar Nuclear Option that only occurs on wider screens.
Then, while I was messing with the footer, I decided to replace the external link indicators on the footer with SVG files. There were a few iterations of that before I got the images to look right. I found that I could just plop the SVG file into the content string. No. It has to be converted to base 64 first, then it will work. Once I got that working for the footer, I change the color of the SVG file and re-converted it to base 64, so I could replace the regular (blue) external link indicator as well. I changed the itty-bitty Blogger logo in the footer to an SVG image since that seems to be a pattern of behavior these days.
After much trial and error, I finally got the header animation working well. Vertical gaps would appear every so often along the right side, Changing the timing on squares 8 and 16 made it better, but, overall there was still too much regularity in the pattern. I was looking for something between broken glass and scattered paper. I experimented with bizarre blobby clip art, but the gaps between them looked much worse. While I was playing with blobs, I stumbled onto the idea of using negative margins to increase the size of the blobs. It helped, but, not enough. So, I reverted to squares and triangles, but, with the new larger sizes and that worked.
Added a template with most of the stock items a new anime might need except for the stars. I still have to add that manually. The pipeline is horrendously clogged. I've got about 160 anime series to add. 120 of them need research. 40 are researched and pending, but, I took care of the low hanging fruit already. I'm down to items that I can't seem to figure out what to write. I've been dipping into the well of unresearched items and pushing them ahead of the pending items. I had published some stubs a few years ago in the hopes that I would come back to them with updates that never happened. I don't want to go down the road again.
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 or copyright issues. For the newest round of updates, I've settled on using images from the image archive that I use for the my Access database. They're already a decent size, but, they're still small enough to not be a good source for cover art scrapers. That, and most of the new crop of anime covers are fake anyway as the industry has moved away from DVD entirely in favor of Blu-ray packaging for archival media and for those items that are streaming only, there are no official covers anyway. I still display DVD-sized cover art and some of my fake covers even have a DVD logo.
The popular posts widget has been cut down to one row of featured items. I've also changed the heading to: You Might Also Like. The related posts widget has likewise seen a reduction in the number of items -- specifically the automatic links to the anime list.
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 helpfully pointing out certain CSS rules that were in conflict with one another. I downloaded a decent looking SVG drawing app and as soon as I opened the app and saw the hundreds of little doo-dads and whooza-whatzits all over the place, I decided it wasn't meant to be and quickly uninstalled that app. I'll stick with Notepad. Thank you very much.
