So… I have taken yet another long hiatus from updating the site. Unfortunately my brother passed away in April and I just haven’t felt like writing since then. I’m still not quite sure about it at this point, but the urge to write a new article is definitely starting to create an itch inside my skull. To those that still subscribe to my RSS and to those that have continued to visit the site even though I haven’t updated in several months I am truly appreciative. Hopefully soon I will be back to full speed and getting some new posts up. I should have plenty to write about since there seem to have been several tasty things that have occurred during my absence.

As always… Thanks for reading

I kind of recently took a bit of a vacation from the site during the holidays. Real life issues made it hard to concentrate on writing, so I decided to do some “research”… If you wanna call it that. I think I must have watched at least 20 or so complete anime series since around Thanksgiving not including the ongoing shows that I’ve been keeping up with every week.

So, I hope everyone had a great holiday, and has a great 2010.

By the way… I am still seeking guest writers for the manga section of the site, so if anyone out there is interested please contact me.

I’m sure some have noticed by now, but at the suggestions of several others I have finally given in and set up a Twitter account for the site, and I’m sure many have seen the craziness on the main page as I wrestled with several different widgets to display tweets on here. I finally settled on one of the simplest widgets which allowed me to customize it with css since most standard widgets don’t display well with my narrow sidebar menus.

Also after a little test the other night with some interesting results (70 additional visits within 2 minutes of posting the tweet) I have decided to post my updates on here to Twitter, so now everything seen here will post there, and vice versa. Except hopefully this post which is sort of a test. The tool I’m using to post to Twitter is set to exclude the “site news” category from the feed, so we’ll see how that works out when I post this. I’ll have to wait until early AM to run a test to see how regular posts work, but I don’t want to mess with the site during the time normal humans are up and about.

Just wanted to let people know if you noticed any weird happenings on the site over the past week I apologize. I have been tweaking the page a bit to make it more to my liking, so you may have seen any number of odd phenomena as I fooled around with the page code and graphics. Hopefully the new changes make the page look a little less like a bad myspace profile. I have been trying to keep the mess confined to the early AM hours, but some errors had to be tracked down throughout the week.

If there are any display problems I would appreciate if you’d send a message about it through the contact page. I have tested it in all major browsers in all screen resolutions above 960 wide so I hope I didn’t miss anything  (Like the semi-colon I spent the last 2 hours tracking down that prevented the page from showing properly in Safari and Chrome *sigh*).

Not really an informative post here, but I’m happy right now, and wanted to share.

Ever since I installed WordPress I have had an issue with the post preview. It never worked to be honest. I couldn’t see a post until it went live on the site errors and all. The spell checker saved me from most spelling errors, but grammatical errors or just clumsy writing was a problem… Usually leading to several edits which I know are annoying to RSS readers since it pops up as an unread post again. Turns out the whole thing was the blog url in the setting section was missing the “www” from the link.

The really fun thing was that while I was searching for a fix to the preview problem I landed on a page that fixed another of my issues. The person that designed the theme I started with decided to encrypt the footer so that it was not editable. Any attempt to change the footer resulted in the page breaking. I’m sure there are others out there with the same issue.

In my case there were several reasons why I wanted the footer changed.

1. So I can edit it as I see fit (I can’t stand not being able to control the elements on my own site)
2. The built in copyright info was wrong (The author set it to “guillotine” the blog title rather than “girochin” I guess this was more an issue with me using a title different than the domain).
3. the designer left links to all his sites as well as some text ads in the footer. Now I don’t usually have a problem with giving credit by a link back to the designer’s site, but in this case the theme was so buggy that I spent a good deal of time fixing bad code, and general editing of the theme, so at this point I feel it’s more my theme than theirs… Other than the graphics there isn’t much left original… Besides… The fact that they were sneaking affiliate ads onto my page is grounds enough to want it gone.

The fix for the footer is rather simple (matter of fact it’s amazing I didn’t run across it myself), so if you want to remove the encrypted code from a WordPress theme footer check the post linked below out, and be sure to leave some feedback as this guy deserves the hero award for figuring out something as useful as this.

Leateds.com: Ever have a wordpress theme with an encrypted footer!

Well… Today marks the one year point of Guillotine being on the web. Hard to believe that a year has gone by so fast.

Here’s hoping for a great second year. Thanks to all who read, and I hope to do better continuing on.

So I decided to finally get around to doing a few fixes, adding some new things, and generally much needed attention.

Item A:

Finally figured out why the site only allowed you to read the first few posts in a category. The theme designer failed to include <previous> and <next> page links in the theme. After fooling with the files they supplied with no effort due to the strange way the designer coded the pages I finally decided it would be easier to pull the files needed from the default wordpress theme and reverse engineer them to look like the original theme. So now there are navigation links at the bottom of each page to allow reading of older articles (and it also allowed me to ditch that stupid calendar widget since that was the only way to go back before).

Item B:

I have  reduced the logo size by 30% because I’ve had some criticism that you can’t see enough of the content without scrolling when the page first loads. Can’t do much more with it at this point other than getting rid of the ad banner, but that placement was the whole idea of choosing this theme in the first place, so it stays. lol

Item C:

Cleaned up some of the old ads in the sidebar. Got rid of any that haven’t gotten any attention. Hopefully this will speed up the page load a bit (not that I ever had any complaints to begin with).

Item D:

Added an Anime News Network RSS feed to the sidebar. Just decided to put some real headlines on the page. Since I usually try to write about things that they don’t cover I feel they are more of an ally than competition, so it seems like a good thing to have.

Item E:

Added tag cloud… Just for fun… The sidebar was looking bare after removing the calendar.

Other small changes I made were the Japanese text in the logo, and above the ad bar. The text in the logo is just the site name “Girochin” (Guillotine in Japanese), and the text above the ads is “koukoku” which means “advertisement”… The word “sponsors” seemed boring.

I think that’s about it for changes. I hope to spend more time on the site, and post more. It’s just been such a slow time for anime news these days it seems like all anime site’s article counts are down lately. So thanks for reading, and hopefully you continue to support the site. Also, if anyone wants to trade back links feel free to email me.

P.S. One more change… I disabled comments due to the seemingly unending flood of Russian spam and Viagra links.

So it appears I’m having a possible issue with spam in the comments, and just wanted to give readers a heads up. Not that I get a lot of comments as it is, but it seems lately I’ve been getting a ton of comments on 3 different articles all in Russian. As a result I’ve set the comments to require an email to leave a comment, and I now moderate all comments before they post on the blog. This seems to have had little effect as I’m still getting about 20 emails to moderate posts written in Russian every day, but at least this way they are not cluttering up the site.

Now I can’t say for sure that they are spam per se… I’ve translated most of them, and they appear to be answering each other’s posts and I am reading actual hits from the ip addresses in my stats, so there may be actual people typing, but the main issue is that the messages though coherent when translated are all completely unrelated to the article or even the site. Therefore I have decided to delete posts in Russian without even batting an eye because regardless of whether they are spam or not the comment pages are not a chatroom for off topic discussions.  I’m also blacklisting those ips simply because I’m tired of seeing the emails and having to delete the messages every day.

For those with blogs I’m sure you are familiar with the upgrade procedure of WordPress. For those that are not familiar I give you a brief rundown. WordPress of course is the software we use to create and maintain our blogs. It is a text editor, publisher, organizer, and even a bit of a messageboard all rolled in to one. At any rate… The software is regularly updated to prevent security issues and to fix bugs, and the rate it updates… Well I’d say there have been at least 5 in the last few months. In the past this meant you either upgrade or you stare at a message telling you to upgrade every time you log in to your blog. Now sometimes this just involved uploading one new file to your server to complete the upgrade, but for anything larger you basically had to upload the entire new program to perform the update.

You can imagine my concern when I updated to version 2.6.5 this week, only to have the dreaded update message pop up only 2 days later telling me I needed to upgrade to 2.7. Oh boy… You mean I gotta do it all over again??? It takes about an hour just to upload the files to my host server, and I just did that a couple days ago. Reluctantly I went ahead with the procedure to discover that it may be the last time I ever have to. For those of us who don’t live on the WordPress site eagerly awaiting every little tidbit of info or every single updated file I’m certain it was a shock to learn that WordPress 2.7 is quite a bit different than 2.6. A completely new looking interface, much more customizable, and the greatest feature they finally decided to implement… Automatic upgrades… Yes… No more uploading the whole program over and over for each update… You just click the update button in WordPress and it’s all taken care of for you.

Very nice, and I thank WordPress for the wonderful new version, but there are a few hiccups like the posting interface (which I’m using now) is a bit slow for some reason, and I haven’t checked yet, but did they ever fix the compatibility issue with Flash 10??? I’m sure those guys are on top of it, and I’ll bet I get to try out the automatic update very soon hopefully with fixes to those issues.

Sorry if I haven’t been writing as much as usual this week… I’ve been sick for one thing (allergies), and also somehow managed to burst a blood vessel in my eye, so trying to read the screen hasn’t been too easy. It hurt my eye just trying to read the headlines in my news reader this week. So, I’m finally getting better (although my eye itches now) and should be back up to speed.

Thanks for reading!!!