Angel's Anime Rating Guide

The table view can either be in your sidebar or in the page body. Archive in Sidebar and Script below. Archive in Page Body and Script below (off screen). After invoking the nuclear option and getting rid of my sidebar, I was thinking about archives and how eminently un-useful they are and I thought to myself. You know what might be really cool... a table. First there were pie charts and now tables? Is my previous life in a corporate environment showing? After quite a bit of poking and prodding, I managed to get a proof-of-concept up and running. A table in a sidebar sounds really interesting until you try to stuff one into less than 300 pixels. Then the reality of the situation reveals itself. This sort of insanity isn't meant for small spaces, so, I've placed my archive table right in the middle of my page.

If Your Browser Supports SVG, An SVG Image Will Appear Here This is very off-topic, but, I wanted to share. For the link to my about page, I wanted a person icon with a transparent background. I had tried a conventional image format like PNG, but, after staring at it on my phone for a while and comparing it to the search icon across from it, I really wanted an icon that remained crisp at different resolutions. SVG seemed to be the format of choice for such things. I needed a generic person icon of my very own in SVG format and with so much AI-generated slop begging for link backs, I decided to try my hand at making my own. After a bit of tinkering on CodePen , I came up with my person icon.

This is very off-topic. But, I'll just preface this by saying that I don't have a magic solution for some hamburger issues on the Emporio template. I've been experimenting with the template in an effort to get the hamburger to appear on the item view and behave in a similar fashion to the home page, but, I'm running into some difficulties. I've used a technique similar to the following on Contempo and Soho , so, I thought I'd give it a try and it failed spectacularly. This is the Emporio -flavored code that I'm using to make the hamburger show on the item view, but, fair warning, it doesn't actually do anything but blank out the page:

I've been an old-school Dos gamer since I had an 8086 PC running actual store-bought MS-DOS . I even wrote my own Dos-based game launcher program (in the Pascal programming language) to make my life easier back in the day. Now, I'm running Windows , but, I still like to play the old DOS-based classics. So, first I needed to install DOSBox . The basic version of DosBox  for Windows is 0.74. Then, there are patches for DosBox that need to be applied, I just download whatever the latest version of the patch files exists on the EMUCR  site, unpack and copy the files to the DosBox installation folder. This will solve some common issues with some Dos games misbehaving.

After more effort than I'd care to admit, the Anime List has been automated. Delving into the inner workings of the Anime List , I realized that there are a handful of items that are not necessarily anime on the list. This is because a few non-anime items have ratings which appear on their respective snippets and the rating data is only applicable to items on the Anime List . In a weird twist, it turns out that the Anime ring is actually a catch-all for anything that isn't flagged for the Mainstream or Other aka Not Anime or Mainstream aka Everything Else  rings. So, for now, at least, these errant items are included among the anime dataset. Once, I figured out the weirdness in the raw data, the anime graph and accompanying listing were fairly straightforward to wire up for automation.

Years ago, when I installed the Contempo template for the first time, I managed with some brute force tactics and a lot of duct tape, to get the header centered. At the time, It took quite a bit to make it happen and there was a lot of pain involved. The reason for all the pain is that Contempo has multiple headers and the template switches between them depending on if you're scrolling, or are on the main site, or on a post or static page. Years ago, I didn't really document what was involved, I just threw everything at it to see what would stick. Now, years later, I don't feel like messing with my old code.

In the aftermath of Blogger removing support for some third-party widgets in their widget store (? I guess), some third-party services simply stopped working. Among the casualties were a number of related posts and page numbering widgets. Some time ago, I acquired code for a decent page numbering mechanism from another site: Helplogger and adapted it for my own use with the Contempo template. The difficulty with some of these widgets is they would rely on external code repositories to do the heavy lifting. And when those repositories stopped working or were otherwise compromised, many users would be affected.

Holiday and British dramas Movies: A to O Movies: P to Z Anime Repackaged Anime: Was Seven Cases Now One BIG Case Repackaged Anime: Next To Empty Cases Cartoons Star Trek / Star Wars August 3, 2026 It's been quite a while, a little over four years since my last post. The giant 150-pound (68 kilos) tube TV which held pride of place in the front of the room has been replaced with a flat screen TV. Under the TV is a new chest of drawers. One can never have too much storage space. My DVD recorder has been retired. It wasn't seeing a lot of use in the streaming-only era. It's been replaced with a Blu-ray player -- one of those app-ified thingies that would love to have an internet connection. Both the Blu-ray player and the TV are going to starve for internet access.

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.

Recently, I stumbled upon a new template hidden deep in the recesses of the Blogger template gallery called Essential . Sneaking a new template into the gallery without an announcement is NOT cool Blogger Team! At first glance, Essential looks strikingly similar to Contempo , but, under the hood, they are slightly different. Informal testing using Google's Page Speed Insights utility showed about a 2% improvement in speed for Essential vs. Contempo . Some gadgets like the Report Abuse gadget have been moved out of the sidebar with Essential .

A while back, I created a gadget to convert Contempo into a Two-Column Layout . At one point, I had managed to do most of the heavy lifting using complicated CSS, but, ultimately, the CSS proved to be a bit flaky and would sometimes fail in some horribly noticeable way. One of the underlying issues was that every once in a while, an errant bold tag would show up among the post snippets and break the normal flow of the page. This errant bold tag was not noticeable in plain vanilla Contempo , but, would rear its ugly head when custom CSS was applied to post snippets that attempted to implement multiple-column layouts in Contempo using floats or other positioning techniques.

A while ago, I devised a solution for a Missing Hamburger In The Contempo Template . Recently, someone stopped by looking for a Soho -flavored solution. For those of you who are unaware, here's a bit of background on the problem... When Blogger rolled out new templates in 2017, the navigation scheme for the new templates was a bit different. I discovered that if your screen width was below a certain width, the sidebar menu was not visible on the home page. For affected users, a "hamburger" icon on the page allowed access to the sidebar menu. However, if you navigated to a post, the hamburger icon disappeared entirely, so, those of us with screen widths below a given width, could not access the sidebar menu at all from post pages.

I wasn't really thrilled with the default About Me section offered by Blogger that links to my profile, so, for a while, I simply didn't have an About Me section. Recently, I wanted to reorganize my sidebar and group some links into a custom  About Me section. Since the new section would, and really should, be at the top of the sidebar, I didn't want it to negatively impact the other sidebar sections below. So, I came up with a way to reuse the expanding and collapsing functionality that appears in the archive and labels sections. In this way, it was hoped that the new section could be collapsed and take up less space in the sidebar.

Sometime ago, I wanted a little something extra in the header to make the image pop a bit, so, I came up with a simple color-shifting mechanism for Contempo that could be applied to any header image. I had mentioned this technique a few times before, but, recently, I felt a little more detail was in order. Just add the following CSS code using Theme > Advanced > Customize > Add CSS :

Years ago, Blogger Introduced Dynamic Views , but, at the time, I wasn't entirely convinced to take the plunge as an early adopter. Recently, I decided to revisit the subject and create a modest Dynamic Flipcard Gallery by invoking a dynamic view in a frame. To get started, add the following HTML using the HTML view in the editor to the post or page where the Dynamic Flipcard Gallery  should appear. Substitute the highlighted text with your blog URL (i.e.: https://www.example.com or https://example.blogspot.com ):

Dimensions: 3000x500 I wanted an animated background in my header, but, I didn't necessarily want a movie playing in the header. While, I think it might be possible, with some sophisticated engineering, to place a YouTube video in the header, I didn't really want something as over-the-top as a YouTube video. Instead, I decided to focus my efforts on using CSS animation techniques to make a background that scrolls sideways.

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...

The Anime List has been an integral part of the Anime Rating Guide since its inception over twenty years ago. My latest adventure being a geek involved upgrading the Anime List . Previously, I used MS Access  to generate lists for two static pages -- a list of anime sorted by title and a second list of anime sorted by rating. I really wanted to combine these two pages into one page that would allow filtering and sorting on demand. So, taking inspiration from Stuart Langridge's Sortable , I used MS Access to generate one list of anime sorted by title, and let the Sortable gadget work its magic. Then, I wrote some custom code to handle filtering on-the-fly and viola, the new Anime List was born.

Recently, a visitor stopped by with a question regarding the sidebar and the margins. In general, adjustments can be made to the content area, the sidebar area and the margins through the Widths menu by selecting Theme > Customize > Advanced > Widths . I've found it useful to let the Contempo template do most of the heavy lifting, but, since the template isn't ideally suited for really wide screens, there can be a lot of white space on really wide screens. So, for screens that exceed a certain width, I use a percentage for the maximum width rather than a fixed number. This allows the content area to use more of what would otherwise be empty space. The CSS snippet below overrides the fixed number defined in the Widths menu, but, only on screens wider than 1300 pixels:

Recently, someone stopped by to ask if it was possible to add the text "Menu" below the hamburger icon in the Contempo template. The short answer is YES . There are two ways to make the change. The text can be added using CSS as shown below or the text can be added manually to the theme HTML, but, editing the theme HTML is not really my area of expertise, so, I'll leave that to the fine folks at the Blogger Help Forum  or if Blogger is feeling a bit less than useful today, the fine folks at StackOverflow will be happy to help.