13 steps

Once upon a time, blogs started getting flooded with spam comments. This was done because in the comment a link would refer back to the spammers site. This is a backlink. The more backlinks you have to your site the higher your pagerank on Google becomes. This is a good thing. Spamming is a bad thing. It got so bad that search engines started checking for a ‘nofollow’ tag that would mean that comments wouldn’t count as backlinks. This was done to stop the spammers, but it was useless. Fast forward to late 2007 and everyone uses anti-spam like Akismet to protect their comments, but software like WordPress still places a nofollow tag on comments. This is bad because valid backlinks from you lovely people who post real comments don’t get counted either.
Enter the dofollow plugin which I have now added and activated.
So as of now all your new (and old) comments have the nofollow removed and thus give you proper linklove the way the internet was supposed to work.

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I made a topic on the forum about this but I figured it’d be interesting to check it here as well. As my blog here is becoming more popular it seems it attracts different people than the ‘old community’ we have on the forum.
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Anime wallpapers seem to be less popular these days, or we’ve disappeared into a Google black hole, so we’re trying something new with Humane leading the way with wallpapers for the upcoming games Silent Hill 5 & Final Fantasy XIII. Especially the last one took quite a bit of work seeing as there’s not a lot of graphics of the game out there yet.
If you like them leave a comment in the gallery.

Wow, 19 people are subscribed to my RSS feed. I’m flattered. *sniffs* Seriously.
And how do I know this? Well, thanks to the lovely Feed Statistics plugin. The great thing about this is that it’s the first plugin I know of that gives you insight to how many people dig your feeds without having to sign up to Feed Burner.

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This is my 250th blog entry.
This website has now been online for 6 years.
0 is the amount of cigarettes I’ve smoked today.

This ’should’ have been a huge entry but I think I’ll keep it zen.

My pet project, finally completed, one less to do.
What is it? Well, social networking sites are fun, but they have one very big flaw in my opinion. You have 0 control over the content. Try finding something you dug on Digg.com, try accessing your bookmarks when Del.icio.us is down, and you’ll see what I mean. My solution: WordPress.
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Fashionably late as always I took a peek at my todo list from hell and decided to turn my attention to social bookmarks. Hip and trendy last year, common and in broad use today. I’ve been meaning to add a plugin for a while but I was never sure if people would really use it. So what is social bookmarking? You know how you bookmark a site in Firefox, or add a favourite in Internet Explorer? Well, same thing, only instead of adding it to your browser you add it to a site. Most notable of these is del.icio.us, the grandaddy of social bookmarking sites. The advantage of this is that you can access your bookmarks no matter where you are. It’s also fun because you get to see who else has bookmarked the same things as you, and check out their other bookmarks as they might be of interest to you.
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No idea why I never thought of this before, but seeing as the anime avatar creator is still one of the most popular features here on the site it finally dawned on me a while back that it might be a good idea to do the same for FF, our other always popular section. So here we go, the Final Fantasy avatar creator.

Ever since the gallery was updated with better session and anti-spam protection all our wallpapers vanished from the search engines, which meant a traffic nosedive of about 3-4000 less unique visitors a day. That’s a lot. Seeing as it hasn’t picked up since and I had a day off to ehm… sort some things out, I decided to finally tackle the problem and whip up a different way of viewing all the wallpapers.
I hope it won’t be too much of a bandwidth drain, mehe.

Anyway, here ya go.

I’m currently switching back and forth between a lot of previous wordpress themes and new ones, trying to figure out what I want. My wishlist for content and bits of pieces I want to display on the front page is quite large, and I still haven’t found one that satisfies me 100%.
I want Hemingway blocks, widgets, latest posts from the forum, latest pics from the gallery, latest entries from the other blogs, the latest entry (a la popurls.com) from a couple of sites I always read, some site stats, albumcovers of stuff I’m listening to at any given moment (using data from last.fm), books I’m reading and other bits and pieces.

And of course, it has to look good. Easy on the eyes, minimalistic yet glossy, and the hardest part given the amount of stuff I want to shove onto the page; it shouldn’t look crowded. Which is extra tricky because a lot of you are still using low resolutions, 1024×768 or less. So to some degree the design has to be fluid or scale properly, seeing as I also want to make good use of screen estate for those of us with higher resolutions. Personally my screens use 1680×1050 and I’m sick and tired of all the layouts that are still fixed to 800×600. That’s half the screen empty.

Oh oh, AND I want to fiddle with loops to break up the monotony. Most themes still have columns going straight down, so there’s one column going down with all the blog entries, one or two columns with nothing but widgets… boring. So I’ll have to fiddle with the loop code to break it up a little, so for example you’ll get one blog entry, then a widget/block, then another entry. I think that’ll look nice.