Angel's Anime Rating Guide

Last year, Blogger began rolling out a new interface for maintaining blogs on the Blogger platform. The new interface has a clean and supposedly phone-friendly design featuring more white space and larger buttons for fat-fingered usage. However, under the hood, there were some rather surprising changes. The Blogger team made a formal announcement of the change on the Blogger Buzz blog: We'll be moving everyone to the new interface over the coming months. Starting in late June, many Blogger creators will see the new interface become their default, though they can revert to the old interface by clicking Revert to legacy Blogger in the left-hand navigation. By late July, creators will no longer be able to revert to the legacy Blogger interface. The rendering of HTML took a decidedly unwelcome turn when Blogger users discovered that certain HTML tags would be stripped out automatically. For users that rely on third-party apps to make formatted posts like those who post recipe c...

This is quite a bit off-topic and about seven months after the actual 20th anniversary of the Anime Rating Guide circa October 2018. Lately, I've been fielding questions regarding some of the behind-the-scenes work that I do to manage this blog and I thought this would be good opportunity to answer some of those questions and commemorate twenty years in existence. Also, before I begin, it should be noted that for some reason that defies description, Advancer Tina , is getting quite a bit of attention lately. But, it's O.K. After all, that's why Tina volunteered for that suicide mission... Is blogging a lot of work? No . Not really. Or, at least it doesn't have to be. Blogging isn't hard. Blogging is about sharing your passion with the world. My passions are anime and computer programming. I've been sharing with the world since 1998. A long time ago, when GeoCities was relatively new and before Yahoo killed it to death, I had already been a devout anime ...

Movie List Table Structure This is a quite a bit off-topic and possibly more than a little boring for some people, but, I felt like sharing, so, get over it. I've been collecting movies for many years and managed to amass over 4000 DVDs. As detailed in my post on the Ultimate Otaku Fall Cleanup , I used to have over 2000 VHS tapes. For many years, I kept a spreadsheet with the various titles in my collection. Way back in the misty dawn of time, I produced printed books with a list of movies, but, after the movie list began to exceed 200 pages of printed text, I moved to presenting the list in electronic format using e-readers like Kindle . With e-readers, lists of boring text proved to be ideal as the early generations of e-readers did not really appreciate being asked to render lots of pretty pages with pictures and text. Eventually, the simple spreadsheet that held my movie list became a bit too unwieldy, so, I migrated the movie list to an Access database. This had immed...

Blood Marble Sphere This is one of my classic Blood Marble spheres on a Blood Sky floor rendered using POV-Ray 3.6. Since the last post, where I detailed my First Year With The Contempo Template , there have been some additional changes to the Anime Rating Guide . The Wallpaper Page received a makeover including new wallpapers and some CSS animation effects thanks to a page on Cool Image Captions with CSS3 by Thoriq Firdaus . The thumbnail images expand and the descriptions drop down over the thumbnails allowing visitors to read the descriptions (or not), but, still see most of the thumbnail images. Along with the new CSS animations, the page layout was changed to display the wallpapers in multiple columns. Likewise, the Anime List Page received some attention including zebra stripes and a touch of color. Under the hood, the section titles now hide themselves for small screens. I had been using an existing image substitution gadget to swap images on-the-fly for the rat...

This post is a bit off-topic, but, I felt I should share. Recently, I got an iRobot to clean the living room (Thanks! Tony). The kitties, Daisy and Chris, eyed the robot with suspicion, but, the robot was surprisingly quiet, so, the kitties were not as upset with the robot as they would have been with the vacuum cleaner. The robot crisscrossed the living room and ricocheted off the furniture in a mysterious pattern, but, somehow managed to do a very good job cleaning the living room. To keep the robot from wandering off into the kitchen, I placed a broom stick in front of the kitchen door as a barrier. Sure, I could have used a virtual wall, but, the broom stick was free and no batteries required. After a few days, the kitties have learned where the robot can and can't go and have staked out viewing spots accordingly. Early on, the robot managed to sneak up on Chris and surprise her, but, lately, Chris has responded by trying out her patented mock charge on the robot in an attemp...

Contempo In 2017 Contempo In 2018 A year has past since Blogger launched new templates. After  Selecting  the Cntempo Template  and living with it for a while, it's been a wild year, but, I managed to settle in reasonably well. The image for this post is a close-up of  Shiro from Deadman Wonderland . Over the past year, several updates were made to Angel's Anime Rating Guide . In 2017, the first change I made was to disable the featured post feature as in the case of my content, since the cover art that I use is not high resolution, the featured post image often appeared fuzzy. Among the other changes over the past year, were the addition of eight new gadgets which are explained briefly in this post and in greater detail in separate posts: Contempo in a Two-Column Format Pretty Dates for Contempo Display Newer Post Links in Contempo Provide the Missing Hamburger for Contempo Popular Posts in a Compact Format Random Posts in a Compact Format Survi...

A to O P to Z Currently, I have over 4600 DVDs. The live-action titles were originally arranged with A though L on a small bank of shelves and M through Z on a larger bank of shelves with TV shows separated from movies on the larger bank of shelves. Recently, I began to run out of space for live-action titles. In an effort to combat issues with the mainstream live-action titles, I decided to consolidate the anime to one bank of shelves. It meant that there wouldn't be much extra space for new titles, but, everything would fit on eleven shelves with a handful of the larger box sets relegated to the topmost shelf. With space recovered from anime, it meant that there was more room to consolidate the animated TV shows and movies. I reorganized them with the mainstream animated movies and Disney animation sorted alphabetically and having pride of place in the front row and animated TV series being placed on the back row. And, all of the animation fit on one bank of shelves. ...

After many years, I have moved the wallpapers from a post, originally dated in 2005, to a dedicated page . I spent some time checking each wallpaper to see where else in the world my wallpapers appear. A review of back links and hot links indicated that there were only a handful of pages in the world that might be affected. Moving the wallpaper post to its own dedicated page would break the connection to the date of the initial post, but, more importantly, it would allow me to take advantage of the page link tab widget. To my pleasant surprise, a handful of my wallpapers do appear elsewhere -- mostly at wallpaper aggregating sites, but, also in a handful of forums and personal sites. Lucy from Elfen Lied seems to be the most popular of my wallpapers. For a while Alias of Westgate from the Forgotten Realms book Azure Bonds , was a close second, but, Alias' wallpaper seems to have faded in popularity over the years. The Saikano wallpaper based on the cover art from an earlier ...

This post is a bit off-topic. Recently, I decided to gather up all of the CDs in my collection and get them organized into a library. I used to use WinAmp -- it was lightweight and had some nice features like skins and visualizations. But, technology had marched on and it was time to try something new. My first choice was iTunes -- it is easy to use and has a very useful service for finding the song names and in some cases even the album cover art. But, I'm getting a little ahead of myself. The first step was installing the software. iTunes was relatively painless to install, but, using the online registration tool on the Apple web site to secure an Apple ID, proved to be surprisingly difficult. The web interface requires that I verify my email address. I tried at least five times to complete the email verification, but, on each occasion, the email verification failed. Fortunately, instead of using the web interface, the iTunes software has an integrated process for securing an ...