1. I Can See Dead Blogs and Posts

The heading says it all, if you’re subscribed to an RSS feed, you’re sure to access the site during downtimes, even when the blog becomes dead or deleted! Even deleted posts won’t escape your sight. Awesome right? For readers, that is. Because for bloggers who want to erase something they’ve written on the interwebz, well, sorry to say but you can’t, not unless Google dies together with your cached data. Once it’s published, it’ll be there. Forever.

Lelangir’s blog, for example, has undergone quite a number of death and revival “cycles”, and if you’re subscribed to his blog’s feed in Google Reader (I’m not sure about the persistency of feeds in the case of other feed readers/fetchers), you won’t have to worry about his future decision to delete/undelete the blog because his posts will right in your Google Reader inbox, available for your reading pleasure.

Still not convinced about the “you can see dead blogs” I’m talking about? Well then, let’s try a little experiment, shall we? We all know that Os’s old blog Karoshi as well as jpmeyer’s あいとゆうきのおとぎばなし are long dead, right? While it may be true that you can no longer access their sites/posts directly, Google Reader allows access to their feed (thanks to the Great Google Cache), which means you can see their posts come alive if you know their blog feed’s URL and subscribe to it (though of course in the case of jpmeyer this isn’t a big deal since he imported his posts from the old site to the new one)! Here’s the feed URL for both Karoshi and あいとゆうきのおとぎばなし, if you feel like trying this out, to prove me right. I also tried this out with Wrex’s Anime Whirls and Helspectre’s blog, just for the kicks. You can try it out with other sites that disappeared from the face of the web, if you feel like reminiscing the good old days when they were still alive.

If the blog don’t offer full feeds however, you’ll only see the snippets of their posts, which means you still have to visit the site to read it in full. So if the blog is already dead or the specific post has been deleted, well, sad to say but you can no longer [fully] read it. Moral of the story (for bloggers)? Provide full-feeds, for posterity!

2. Unblock the Cockblockers! Images not included.

Simply put, you can read posts from blogs and other sites, even if they’re blocked by your cockblocker network administrator through Google Reader (again, I’m not sure how other feed reader fetch/synchronize the feeds, so I’m just going specific here, on the reader where I tried and tested this). This is particularly useful for those who read blogs at work, school, or other places with secure/strict network policies. The images uploaded in the blocked sites, however, will still not be visible in your feed reader since that would have to be fetched from the site itself.

And yet again, this will only be an advantage if the blog offers full feeds, otherwise you’d still have to visit the site to see the rest of the post. But since the site is blocked, well, boohoo you still can’t read it. Feel free to use a proxy site and hope your net ad won’t catch you red-handed.

Do take note however that you might run into image-loading problems with blogs that have hotlinking protection enabled (and not disabled for the feeds), and you’ll see this “NO HOTLINKING” image plastered all over the posts — one of the disadvantages of subscribing through RSS; not like that can stop you from going RSS, right? Right?

3. Avoiding Bad Design Like a Plague

Admit it, there are sites out there which tick you off with its aesthetic unpleasantness and activate your “design elitist” genes — the ones that make you wanna scream “OMGZ YOUR SITE DESIGN SUCKS BUTT”. Now if you don’t want to get distracted by the ‘horrendous’ theme design (that you yourself labeled), then do yourself a favor by subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed so you can read it in your feed reader instead — simple and clutter-free. Minimalists will surely opt for this.

Again, this will only happen if the blog offers full feeds (I know I’m sounding like a broken record here, but this just goes to show how much advantage full feeds will give); otherwise you’d be left with no choice but to visit the blog and put up with its fugliness. Poor you.

4. Oh Notes!

The notes feature of Google Reader was brought to my attention by feed crazy Ryan, and it’s not until recently that I started getting into the habit of blog post note-taking. This goes hand-in-hand with otou-san’s helpful tip on how to use Google Reader to follow comments, with the latter allowing your Reader to act as a Breadcrumb application of some sort, as you’ll be able to keep track of your “commenting trail” in the ‘sphere, and the former for writing scribbles and notes about the post — either why/how it compelled you to comment, or anything else about it that you found rivetting, or other sentiments you may have about it — taking “tagging” one step further, in a way (omg long sentence is longgg).

Both of the aforementioned tips are a godsend to me, since I’ve been meaning to find a way to keep track of remarkable posts I run into, for future reference, or for future commenting (since there are posts which are ZOMG AWESOME, leaving you starstruck and unable to churn out an insightful comment in a whim).

5. Let’s Zoom In!

Time for a little personal narrative.

Back in the day, I never thought I’d find much use for RSS feeds, or aggregators for that matter, since I was an egotistic blogger who was far too engrossed in my own blog to bother about the whole blogosphere.[1] The moment I finally decided to stop being lazy and discover the anime community out there, I relied on Anime Nano and Animeblogger antenna, and found them pretty neat, as they provide you with this “wide angle view” of the blogosphere – the horde of blogs out there, the latest buzz, trends, and issues that you shouldn’t miss out on.

I hate being out of the loop, especially with riveting topics that I want to piggyback on, knowing well that I would’ve contributed some insights in the whole discourse (if I’m not being lazy). But I digress.

Despite how aggregators provide a convenient means to keep in touch of / reach out to the anime community, at one point I just felt it wasn’t enough. I wanted to get closer not only to the “community”, but the people / bloggers who make up this community in the first place. I looked for a way to “zoom into” the bloggers, and Google Reader did just that — now I have the anime community, right at my fingertips. All that’s left to do is to stop procrastinating and get into reading their posts, and participate in ongoing discussions.

Like Kabitzin, I never thought I’d find much use for RSS feeds, until I finally started using Google Reader to keep track of blogs, and has then become an indispensable part of my geeky otaku life.

UPDATE:

6. Be More Social, Share.

omg how could I have not included this! Thank you lolikit for reminding me about this.

The notes feature mentioned above, is one of the ways you can get more “social” with Google Reader, and it all boils down to one thing — sharing (or “pimping”). You can share notes, in connection to a post that you want to pimp to your friends (in Google Talk), for whatever reasons. And this turned out shorter than I expected, oh well.

…and that’s basically it for my so called “testimonial”. Feel free to add to this list, the more RSS testimonials, the better (better chances of converting more people too! )!

If you remain unconvinced to take advantage of feeds after reading this post, well I still hope you guys will drop by and continue to read our random babblings. Now if this post actually did convince you, I suggest taking a look at otou-san’s RSS guide (for those who still haven’t seen it, or have no idea how to go about using Google Reader), and I can only hope that you’ll add us in your feed reader — if you deem us worthy that is. Earning a spot in your reader = earning a place in your heart, after all (whether that’s good or bad only you can tell). Oh gawd this is getting cheesy, have to end this before it gets worse.

Hope you learned something from this, at the very least :3

Toodles!

[1] Proofs of my egotismSimilar Posts:

• One Month in the Books
• Countdown to Christmas #2: On Being Part of the Anime Blogging Community (in general, not simply ABC)
• Last Call for ABA Nominations, Before Earth Day Ends
• WordCamp Philippines 2008: On Being a Remarkable Responsible Blogger
• Micro-blogging is Confusing the Heck Out of Me Now, But I Has Gained Englightenment!

twitter-ing. SRS BSNS.

I never quite understood the rationale behind having multiple twitter accounts (I first noticed this with Icy’s twittering escapade), until Impz announced the birth of the THAT merry bandwagon twitter, and everything just started to make sense! As you’ve noticed (or most likely not), I invaded the sidebar with my self-indulgent twitter-ing, which is, to say the least, a useless pile of crap that no one really bothers to read in the sidebar! I mean, would readers bother checking the site just to see the latest trivial happenings in my life, like a BLOODY paper cut event, for example? If I was just a casual reader who wants to know about animu/manga and couldn’t care any less about the blog author’s boring real life events, I sure won’t give a damn about that.

So, what better way to make the twitter sidebar more useful but to follow the footsteps of THAT, and transform it into a mini blog where the chefs can spit random blurbs on the animes they’re watching, mangas they’re reading, and on other otaku-ish/blogging endeavors! This way, it will be Scrumptious Blog-relevant, and allow me to separate my otaku/non-otaku persona for the sake of my RL friends on twitter who are not into anime too X__X Sorry for spamming your twitter updates with my nonsense babblings lol. You’ll get to see more of the chefs this way too (you might not see a blog update, but you’d most likely find a blurb there or two, will make sure we update it on a regular basis to keep you guys updated on what’s happening behind-the-blogging-scenes), especially our dear hamster chef Seleria who has become too lazy to post (she needs your encouragement, dear readers!! Show her that she has fans! ), but still has enough energy to watch animes and tweet blurbs about it. I’m still finding ways to make updating this easier, especially for my fellow chefs. Hopefully, absolute0 and BeLe can join us in this diabolical tweeting plan too. In case you missed the twitter link, it’s here.

Your feedbacks will be much appreciated! If you think the twitter sidebar still sucks, then tell us what you think we can do to improve it. Cheers!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.Similar Posts:

• [Poll] Help Us Decide What to do With the ‘Asides’ Section of the Blog
• ‘Asides’ Assimilation Almost A-Ok
• More Blog Theme Tweaks
• Micro-blogging is Confusing the Heck Out of Me Now, But I Has Gained Englightenment!
• usagijen: Tweaking the blog to aggregate my blog ‘Asides’ w/ my MAL blog and twitter. Once this blurb gets syndicated into the blog, success it’ll be.

…someone else will, in my behalf (if the subs come out, that is), considering that he is the true Junjou Romantica fan (yes you heard me write, he’s a fudanshi ). As such, it’s gonna be from a [slightly] biased POV too. I’m looking forward to reading his posts myself, knowing well that he is a talented writer, and my good friend. The interesting things are yet to come, so watch out for it!

and wow, this is quite a pretty good timing, since someone just decided to troll one of my JR posts to proclaim it as the BEST YAOI SHOW, EVAR.

EDIT: It seems that people didn’t quite get what I said, so here’s the simplified version: I recruited my officemate to become a part-time chef and write about Junjou Romantica, considering that he’s a real fan of the show. As such, it’s a totally biased (for) POV, unlike mine which is more on the dark side lol.Similar Posts:

• My Two-Sided Relationship with Junjou Romantica
• Junjou Romantica: A Word of Advice
• For the Love of Toshokan Sensou
• Because I Heard People are Hating on Junjou Romantica
• The Otome Games Digest #5

I finally decided to separate this chunk from my Someday’s Dreamers post to inform people that this is for everyone, aka it won’t alienate you if you’re not a Someday’s Dreamers fan because it’s not really about the show. If you’ve read my Natsu no Sora episode 04 post, feel free to skip this. or not, your call

Quietly anticipating many of the summer shows has left me nostalgic about the episodic-blogging nature of many of my posts before. I’m really missing it now, badly. I did mention that one of the reasons why I decided to blog was for some ego-boosting effect, but as I look deeper into my heart, I realize that my love for those shows was pure and genuine. This love is what really drove me to blog them (the attention seeking was a 2nd aim of some sort, which became one of the ultimate source of many of my silly blogging blues). Oh nostalgia~ I only have Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto ~Natsu no Sora~ (which will just be called ‘Someday’s Dreamers Natsu no Sora’ from hereon) and Natsume Yuujinchou to blame for all this cheesiness

I miss blogging and blabbing random stuff about the shows I watch. I miss the times when I get myself all lost in thoughts after watching an episode of the animes I anticipate, churning out whatever randomness that comes into my mind. I’m talking about KimiKiss and True Tears here, specifically. One thing I loved about episodic blogging is how it brainwashes makes me gain more appreciation for the show, or at least allow me to understand why I love or hate it. Posting about these thoughts and feelings then serve for its posterity, so I can one day look back and see what shameful things I’ve been saying

I miss having those round of discussions with other bloggers, going through the whole journey of following a series together with them and other visitors or commentators of the site. The True Tears and KimiKiss roundabout posts were such fun times~ Looking back at those posts sometimes make me wonder how I managed to say all those stuff, actually lol. I guess that’s what happens when my heart and mind is at peace, when I’m not thinking of anything else but wanting to share my genuine thoughts and feelings Similar Posts:

• A Farewell to Episodic Blogging: Off to Discover My Naritai Jibun
• For the Love of Toshokan Sensou
• Last Call for ABA Nominations, Before Earth Day Ends
• Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto ~Natsu no Sora~ 5-7: Unmagically Magical
• Micro-blogging is Confusing the Heck Out of Me Now, But I Has Gained Englightenment!

Foreword: This is what I get for attempting to “micro-blog” in more than one place at a time.

Remember the ‘Asides’ help we asked you guys before? Well, that sort-of worked for and against us (or rather me, the source of all randomness around this blog). It was a delight knowing that you guys are interested in our boring lives and other commentaries we might have. But then because of the jack-of-all-trades ambition of our ‘Asides’, I also managed to confuse the heck out of myself with the schemes I’ve been devising to make this section more effective and efficient. I brought my MAL and twitter into the blog, which I decided to use for blurbing on animes and RL or otaku stuff, respectively, by aggregating their feeds with the Asides category.

Given that this section consists of all sorts of randomness, I considered them to be ‘noise posts’ which seem out of place in the blog and excluded them from the blog’s feed. And then came this one Aside post I wrote, a random babble on the Birdy the Mighty OAV, Aika, City Hunter and Yakushiji Ryouko, which I also posted in my MAL blog. My desire to share this experience with people prompted me to once again include the Asides category in the feed, so people would be notified of this post. As it turns out, that simple “Asides” blurb was just about as potent as any random posts I have. People shared their thoughts on City Hunter, and perhaps I piqued other people’s interest on Birdy the Mighty? Now if that post remained as an invisible Aside post and/or a lonely MAL blog post, I doubt it would’ve garnered such a response.

As I sat down and think about all this Asides microblogging jambalaya, I remember Hige’s post about Microblogging and the conventions we set for our blog, and wondered why the heck I even went to all the trouble of separating my MAL blurbs from the main blog. Perhaps I thought they wouldn’t be potent enough, that unlike Hinano’s babbles, mine would be useless thoughts bubbles which are better off ignored? Or perhaps I just wanted to take down notes and later on use them for a more noteworthy editorial-like post? Whatever it is, I felt alienated from my own blog because of all these made-up conventions which never should’ve been there in the first place.

You see, I babble a lot. The dilemma I usually face in making a post is that I can’t make it coherent enough to become a noteworthy post. That, or I can’t express my feelings about a show eloquently enough. Or that my comments are too short, and whatnot. As iniksbane summed up and pointed out, one of the main reasons behind this micro-blogging fad is the concept of blog identity. What bloggers think don’t fit into this blog identity, will then go to the micro-blog. Then I paused for a while and asked myself, what is our blog’s identity anyways? What is my identity as a blogger?

I’m nowhere as smart as IKnight, Owen, Hige, and itsubun. Yes this line has been said for who knows how many times but I’ll say it again because that’s how I feel, and that’s what makes it different. I’m not as witty as Kabitzin and issa nor as entertaining and funny as Hinano, Baka-Raptor, DS and lolikit though I try, from time to time But seriously, what the heck right? Right now there are so many jumbled thoughts on my mind, comments for much about every summer show I sampled. There are also other stuffs I want to fangurl about. And I’d like to think that the faithful readers of this blog would want to know them. *ahem* Amirite or not? Ok, no need to answer that.

In times like this, a little self-talk is good, something like “Have faith in your goddamn random babbles and thoughts, demmit!” So yeah, post length and whatsoever conventions be damned, I say. I’m just gonna blurb and whatsoever here, in a similar manner as my tweeting perhaps, but in a more “organized” manner. As much as I want to write more editorials, creative inspiration can sometimes be bleak, and I don’t really want to stop writing during those blogging lull moments, since I still want to share my thoughts on what I watch (and read or play even). So there, this is totally free-form blogging desu~! I’ve already said before that this blog is the extension of my soul, and by voicing out whatever thoughts I have, I still am abiding by that dogma. Blogging is a way for me to share my thoughts and feelings, and just being my thoughts alone is enough of a reason for me to post about it (and I once again remember a passage from Rilke’s book).

That said, I’m going to forget about blogging in MAL now, and perhaps the Asides too, since I don’t know what I’m gonna post there now .___. I feel more comfortable in spouting random blurbs on shows I’m watching and what I’m doing in twitter (or plurk, a much cooler 3D kind of twitter, though I think this one works best for more accustomed acquaintances and friends). What can be more convenient than being able to post twitter blurbs through your firefox status bar (or other more convenient means, depending on the twitter tool you’re using)! Now I can finally say that I found my NARITAI JIBUN, being a randomly raving rabbit I’m leaning towards the idea of turning the blog into a うさぎ友人帳 (usagi’s book of friends) or シェフ友人帳 or something Similar Posts:

• usagijen: Tweaking the blog to aggregate my blog ‘Asides’ w/ my MAL blog and twitter. Once this blurb gets syndicated into the blog, success it’ll be.
• More Blog Theme Tweaks
• ‘Asides’ Assimilation Almost A-Ok
• Our Twitter Now Has [Multiple] Personality!
• [Poll] Help Us Decide What to do With the ‘Asides’ Section of the Blog

Just to keep you guys updated with what’s happening in the metablogging scene of Scrumptious, here are the bunch of experiments changes/updates made to the blog since my last announcement:

• After months of using this new theme, I only realized that the tags pages are not working! So yeah, tags are useless atm I replaced them with categories now, so you see them after the post ["filed under "]
• After hours of debating (with myself) about what font to use (the site seems to be having issues with the original sans serif font), I finally settled with the good old Verdana. Big bulgy font FTW! Less classy, but more readable as well.
• I restored WP-Spamkiller again, after the sudden increase in the spams we’re getting these weeks. I don’t have time to check the spams gathered to see whether there’s any comments mistaken to be spam, see :/ If you guys still encounter the Javascript error, please contact us so we’ll know how many of you are having this issue. In the meantime, you can use another browser to post your comment, that’s how I managed to post my comment on blogs where I encountered the same error. It’s a pain but yeah >_< We’ll see what we can do about this.
• And I think most of you have noticed the smilies toolbar we have over there in the comments area. It’s all thanks to the plugin Smilies Themer and this lovely Pau emoticons pack by Noktah Hitam.
• I finally gave in to tweeting. The other chefs actually have their twitter accounts too, but they’re too shy to reveal it to the public And I’m enjoying twitting so much that it’s gonna be where I’ll blurb about almost everything. I’m getting all confused about what to write in our Asides post and also in my MAL blog, so to end my agony, I’ll just go tweet them all!
• And last but not the least, we have a new Review Index page accessible through the header menu. This idea was shamelessly borrowed from otou-san, with his clean and organized professional-looking site (unlike ours) I actually wonder if I should include even the series we dropped blogging, hmm.

Ja ne! See you when I get the tags working or something Don’t forget to vote in the poll embedded in this post (also in the blog sidebar), or drop as a comment about what you think of this theme so far. Comments and suggestions are most welcome!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.Similar Posts:

• Apologies for the Comment Problems
• Introducing WP-SpamFree, Say Goodbye to Spam, and Your Comments Too
• More Blog Theme Tweaks
• Scrumptious Version 2.0 and the [Accidental] Blog Upgrade
• The Wonders of [Hidden] Fansub Translation Notes

EDIT: I’m terribly sorry for this plugin rant, with which I disrespected the plugin author WebGeek in the process. Despite the seemingly negativity of this post, I just like to say that WP-SpamFree remains a great plugin. Unless you run into the same problem as I did, it works like a charm and really lives up to its name.

When Owen recommended me this WP-SpamFree plugin months back, I was really impressed. I even recommended it to Mike of Anime Diet because of how it really made our blog virtually spam free. I had never felt so free from the shackles of spam! On a random note, we should make a naming convention for addressing Mike of Anime Diet and Mike of anime|otaku, it gets confusing at times. And no, suggesting “the Mike Owen loves” and “the Mike that Owen hates” won’t make things any better.

But I digress. As we all know, nothing in this world is perfect, not even the ultimate spamkiller WP-SpamFree. Aside from requiring Akismet, this plugin has another MAJOR drawback (which made it EPIC FAIL, at least for me - yes I know I was being too harsh earlier for branding it FAIL, when it’s not): It devours not only yummy spams, but scrumptious comments too! If you’re one of my poor commentators who encountered this error message when you submitted the comment you worked so hard for:

Sorry, there was an error. Please enable JavaScript and Cookies in your browser and try again.

…I’m sorry to say that the killer plugin devoured it

A friend of mine who commented on the blog months back was the first ever person I know who encountered this problem. But then it seemed as if this never happened to other visitors (or so I thought), hence I continued using it anyways. How foolish I was to not have realized any sooner that more comments were being devoured behind the scenes. Thanks to Kabitzin for reminding me about this issue I should’ve looked into beforehand =__=

I’m not sure who else experienced this, but so far only Caitlin informed me about this. Guess our commentators are too shy to inform us about this problem? lol.

That said, I’m happy to say that I finally uninstalled this comment-eater plugin, so keep your comments coming, people! No monster shall devour them now

P.S. As Kabitzin pointed out, the problem with the plugin seems to stem from plugin conflict issues (something also which escaped my mind when I was writing this post). But with the tons of plugins I have, and the headache I’m gonna get to figure out which plugin is causing this conflict, for now, I’m going to say goodbye to WP-SpamFree first.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.Similar Posts:

• Apologies for the Comment Problems
• Scrumptious Version 2.0 and the [Accidental] Blog Upgrade
• The Obligatory Scrumptious Blog Updates Post
• Countdown to Christmas #2: On Being Part of the Anime Blogging Community (in general, not simply ABC)
• Belated Happy April Fools! And No, The Bunny is Not A Lie!

So if you guys haven’t noticed the silly tweakings I’ve been doing with the sidebar and the ‘Asides’ section in the front page, I actually managed to assimilate my MAL blog and twitter blurbs into it. I syndicated my posts from these two sites, so they became part of my posts now (hence you also see them in the archives). I think I’m gonna have to exclude these posts from the archives / recent posts list, they don’t seem to belong there >.< If this doesn't work out the way I want, then I'll just opt to aggregating my feeds for the 'asides', MAL blog, and twitter.

I don't know how long I'll be able to keep up with twittering, since I don't think my personal life is all that interesting, but oh well. Perhaps I'll just twitter my "personal otaku life" instead. The other chefs are all too shy to openly share about their own personal life, so you'll have to bear with MY blurbs for now

And in case you’re wondering, I’m still here at the office, gonna spend the night here because we’re leaving at early morning tomorrow (2:30 AM). It’s past office hours so I’m free to do what I want nyahaha. I just don’t have access to YM, GTalk and such IMs, so I’m still kinda disconnected to the interwebz.Similar Posts:

• Our Twitter Now Has [Multiple] Personality!
• [Poll] Help Us Decide What to do With the ‘Asides’ Section of the Blog
• More Blog Theme Tweaks
• usagijen: hello twitter~! ‘guess I’ll just post personal RL stuff here, than in my blog or elsewhere. I guess this means “hello stalkers” too eh, lol.
• Micro-blogging is Confusing the Heck Out of Me Now, But I Has Gained Englightenment!

Paranoid as the chefs are, we never got to upgrade our blog to WP 2.3. We talked about some upgrade plans months back, and even spent quite a deal looking for a new spunky theme for our blog, on top of checking plugin compatibility issues. I fell in love with The Morning After theme, but due to the busy life of the chefs that time, on top of uncertainties if the upgrade will go well and an advice from Maestro not to upgrade to 2.3 yet, no blog upgrade(s) happened, not even a banner change!

Months passed, we celebrated our first year anniversary with our old and rusty banner/theme, and WP 2.5 gets released. We heard great things about it, but still remained paranoid as ever. Then I found this Instant Upgrade plugin to automate the installation/upgrade process, making it easy and safe. And I remain paranoid orz. So what I did was to test it first in a local copy of wordpress I have, to see if the upgrade will go smoothly. The upgrade process in my local wordpress blog got stuck in the first phase of downloading the latest wordpress release, and it finally became successful after a little workaround. I installed the plugin in our blog here, then tested it to see if I’ll encounter the same problem with my local copy. With a blink of an eye, the blog got upgraded… o.O I was expecting the installation won’t proceed or something, but oh well. Voila, the site has been upgraded! with just one broken plugin ^^;;

Then last night, after watching ROOKIES, I got all pumped up and started tweaking The Morning After theme, and the result is this magazine looking blog. Thanks to fellow chef absolute0, our banner has finally changed but still gay as ever. So now we also have gravatars, author avatars (manually coded, sucky programming x__x;; ), [not-yet-annotated] blogroll, dropdown archives and recent posts to save space, etc. Other tasks left to do would be finishing the contact form page, [re]arranging the sidebar widgets, fixing the comment form and basically tweak the style further for better readability and navigation. Have to find a better recent comment plugin too, unless I want to code/tweak it myself… @__@;;;

Feel free to drop your comments here! Comments and suggestions would be highly appreciated ^^Similar Posts:

• Apologies for the Comment Problems
• The Obligatory Scrumptious Blog Updates Post
• Introducing WP-SpamFree, Say Goodbye to Spam, and Your Comments Too
• WordCamp Philippines 2008 Shout Out
• More Blog Theme Tweaks

So it seems that some of the great anime blogging sempais are making their comeback, thanks to the almighty OS who woke them from their slumber. While those who have long been in the blogging scene and witnessed their legacy are going “Natsukashii~“, we n00bs could simply bow down in awe of them m(_ _)m. And the great(est) thing about this is that, 3 of these sempais are girls (Newt, and *ahem* Ate Ten and Ate Reika? :P). Hurray for more females in the blogosphere! ;___;

Also, with the recent rise of itsubun into this sausage-fest blogosphere comes this plan of female blog-o-domination! Ok, it’s not really as diabolical as it sounds. We’re basically planning to have an all-girls round-robin, where we vote or choose for a particular topic or issue we want to discuss, everyone in the gang (or the interested members, at least) writes a post on it, linkwhore each other, and the result is this EPIC girl-power-filled discussion. We have several potential topics in mind atm, but I’m not disclosing them here or it’ll ruin the surprise factor

And now for a word from itsubun (QFT!): (silly me for thinking Sasa wrote up the invitation email =.=; )

Please note that the issues we may choose to discuss do NOT have to be gender-related or gender-focused. Meaning that the topics up for discussion can be about pretty much anything as long as it is democratically decided upon by the other participants of the round-robin. I understand that for some of you, you do not believe that gender should be the focal or highlighting trait of your writing. And I agree. Because as bloggers, anime-lovers, and human beings, we are ultimately so much more than just our sex. I believe that as long as you girls write in your own voices and write honestly about how you really feel about whatever these topics may be, I know that you will have much to say and contribute to this round-robin. The point of this project is to meet other girls in the blogosphere, and be in touch with one another in order to cultivate community and support for one another’s ideas and writing.

Think of this as the all-female counterpart of the ABC or the ones who plan to take over the ABC ohoho~, where we girls can interact with each other, share ideas, all in the hopes of encouraging more females to speak out, without having to worry about being intimidated by the horde of guys in the blogosphere and being demoralized because of their gender, or well, just to meet new friends and know that “THERE ARE NO GIRLS” on the internet, as itsubun puts it

Members so far include: itsubun, Sasa, me, CJ, Ashley, Hinano, j1m0ne and Marmot. Update: Ashley is IN! :3

Anyways, we’d be delighted to have more girls on board this round-robin crew (*hint hint*)! Interested parties (girls only plz) can contact us through email, or by leaving a comment on this post :3 and be sure to comment on itsubun’s post, she is after all the mastermind of this

Last but not the least, I’m proud to say that Shugo Chara won in the Best Children’s Manga category of this year’s Kodansha Manga Awards! ^___^ This calls for a celebration! w00t!Similar Posts:

• On Digest Posts and Otome Games News
• Leaping to the Cinema to Watch the Girl Who Leapt Through Time
• [Round-Robin] Anime and Escapism: Living in and Out of Your Comfy Anime Burrow
• Kaze no Stigma Manga Ends with the Misao Arc. Short and Sweet.
• Minami-ke - 01 Head Spinning Hawt Sisterly Desires