Those of you who watch my chart livestreams know that I do not have a single icon on my desktop.
I personally hate it when icons are hiding the desktop wallpaper, so I’m using other means to have everything at hand : Launchy is one of those means.

This little program allows you to add files of any type and from any directory (you can chose file types on a per folder basis) to a “catalog” of files.
When a file is added to the catalog, use Launchy and type-in a few letters of that executable/link/file and the program will look inside the catalog’s entries to suggest you one or several results. Then, all you have to do is to press the Enter key and the program is launched or the file is opened.

Example below :

The program can be a little resource-hungry if you do not have a lot of memory, but overall this is a great tool to have imo, and it keeps your desktop much cleaner as well ! The best way to use the program is to assign it a launch hotkey for quick-usage.

Launchy can be downloaded for free at this address.

Because the default skins were a bit plain, I decided to take the matter in hand and make my own one. I thought that maybe other people here would be interested in such a skin, so I made a pack of custom backgrounds compatible with my custom skin (which is a modified version of the original, further modified by another person, and then by me).

Download Skin Pack 1

If you use the program, I hope you’ll enjoy one of those backgrounds together with your new skin. I’ll make other packs when I got the time as well.

Got a particular picture you’d want to use with the custom skin? throw me a link to your picture and I’ll see what I can do. Any picture is accepted (SFW, NSFW, 18+), provided that it’s higher than 255px and wider than 465px. I only do Anime/Pixiv/Imageboards related pictures, because I want to stick with what this site is about.

I’m getting a bit tired about everything right now, so this was a needed break for me. Sorry for the trouble!
When there are too many things to do, you just don’t know where to start and end up not doing/wanting to do anything. This was (or rather, still is) the case for me, but I suppose no one is surprised about that anymore. We’ll see if I can do something about this.

But for now, happy late Halloween

Long story short, I took some time and reworked the mail template that was containing the posts, and which was sent to post subscribers. Each mail client has its own way of rendering emails within their application, so the rendering was all messy because some html tags do not work with all mail clients (like the “center” tag, which breaks the rendering in gmail; gj gewggle). Also, on some mail clients, the post would take all the available space instead of a fixed width, which resulted in an ugly parade of scattered text and images on large monitors. Nasty.

The new design has been tested with Hotmail, Outlook and Gmail, and renders just fine.
Border on all images isn’t working, dunno if I can fix this.
Solo images will often be centered, even if it wasn’t set this way within the image tag (happy fail from mail clients again). Images next to each other tend to “glue” themselves together which is acceptable, though I’ll try to give it a little spacing if I can.

Didn’t test it on other clients, so feel free to tell me if something’s broken on your client, and I’ll try to fix it when I get some time. Neregate currently has 121 post subscribers, and I doubt that it’s going to render nicely for everyone.

The design change (old on left, new on right) :

Hope you folks will like it. At least it looks decent now
Wanted to keep the same width as the posts on the blog, as well as keeping the design relatively simple.
Well, I like the result so far. ]]> http://neregate.com/blog/2012/08/18/new-mail-display-for-post-subscribers/feed/ 2 http://neregate.com/blog/2012/08/09/and-were-back/ http://neregate.com/blog/2012/08/09/and-were-back/#comments Fri, 10 Aug 2012 06:00:37 +0000 Zana http://neregate.com/blog/?p=8902


After a few days of work, Neregate is back on track.

How exciting it is to manage a website, running into problems one after another.
I’ll be catching up on posts and emails a bit later, but for now I’ll list the most significant changes that were made during the maintenance.

- Neregate now uses a cache system that covers the entire blog. I didn’t want to look into this before because of the complexity of the site (mature content filter and cache conflict with each other).
Since I had to do it to reduce the load on the database, I managed to code something to make them coexist nicely with each other. The only drawback is that users with mature content filter turned off will still download 18+ posts on pages, but won’t see them. Couldn’t find a better alternative (and I doubt there is one) yet. Hopefully there aren’t that many 18+ posts so the load won’t increase much.
The good point is that cached pages will load almost instantly, improving browsing speed on already visited pages (by you or somebody else). Cache is purged every few hours or so.

- Reworked the content warning filter, which no longer requires a page reload, and works with the cache as well. Gotta find a solution for users with JavaScript turned off, as they won’t see the warning :/

- Recent charts have been compressed from PNG to JPG, to reducing download time (which is taking processing slots). The JPG compression used is optimized for the web and provides excellent quality and compression, so the quality difference won’t be that big between now and before. About two thirds of the bandwidth are taken by charts (~1TB per month, out of ~1.5TB total), so this is small change for a huge server-side improvement !

- Hotlink protection is active. Any website trying to like to my images directly will now feel the wrath of Nyaruko.

Currently working on implementing a new image slideshow for the main page. The current one is a pain to maintain, and keeps breaking over and over (like now.. *cough*).
Because of the load, I’m starting to wonder if I should just remove the image galleries permanently (they’ve been offline for a while anyway).
Will be catching up later on other fixes and posts, as I need to get back to work. There are other background changes, but nothing users should be aware of.

Cache system is quite delicate to handle on Neregate so if you have any trouble or find anything wrong, please get back to me asap so that I can look into it. Thanks !

Btw, that ain’t news, but new banners.

I won’t be able to do anything fancy this year since I’m not at home right now but still, I’ll try to write a few things down. This sucks a bit, especially since the blog has been dormant for a little while now.

Hopefully, I’ll be back home in a couple days with several things you’ve been waiting for : Fall chart, Imageboard, etc.

Yosh, let’s write down some things now.

• Some numbers first

On the 13th July of last year, I made another birthday post, explaining a few things about the creation of the blog, about me, about statistics, etc (yeah, I can write long posts sometimes). Feel free to read it if you’re curious about Neregate’s history.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the blog’s growth between this year at the last.
Because numbers are easy to understand, here are few of them :
• 1,056 Posts (548 last year)
• 4,345 Comments (1,801 last year)
• 1,286,461 Views since July 13, 2010 (one year ago, views were at ~200,000)
• ~5000 Views per day (~1500 last year)
• ~1,3TB Bandwidth per month (~230GB/month last year)

Most visitors come from the United States (large lead), followed by Germany, Indonesia, Russian Federation, Poland, Canada, Australia, Finland, Brazil, Philippines, Great Britain, Mexico, France, Malaysia and Italy (etc).

Neregate now appears on g00gle’s suggested search results with just 4 letters, which is a big milestone that I thought I’d never reach. I don’t think that reaching 3 letters will ever be possible though.

For Neregate, who’s just another website in this vast world that we call the anime blogosphere, this went far beyond my expectations. Two years that I’ve been polluting the place with Japanese Artists, Anime Charts, Artworks and, of course, my lolis and my rants.
I have no plans of stopping here, as I even want to bring a lot more things to you in the coming months. This, is all because of your presence and support (regulars, as well as newcomers and lurkers alike) : Thank you! Uncle is really grateful to have people coming to this little place of his.

• Stuff coming next

Speaking about new things (already mentioned most of them in this post) :
- The Fall 2012 Anime Chart will be released next week, with a whole new design. There also is a nice addition that’ll be coming with this chart shortly after ! Because of the project’s size, I’ll probably just release the main part first, followed by the next ones within the next few months (I hope).
Note : I will probably need a helping hand once it gets released. I’ll write some more details when the actual thing is out.

I’ve had several translation requests in my mailbox regarding the Anime Charts, but most of them are on standby. I know that Photofiltre Studio (the software I use to create the charts) isn’t well known among the community, so I’ll be switching back to Photoshop (sob) to make it easier for you to translate the chart to your native language.
If you are interested in translating the upcoming Fall chart to your language, feel free to drop me an email, before or after the release.
You’ll have to agree to a couple rules before you actually work on the translation (these are common sense rules, but I still want people to be fully aware of them beforehand), but the biggest obstacle will always be your motivation. In my charts, I also put summaries for all the OVA section, which is a lot of work for a translator !

- The Image Board is coming back in a few days too. I know I should’ve put a proper maintenance page on this subdomain of mine, but I thought the “On maintenance, sorry!” htaccess message would be explicit enough :/

• And..

..That’s about it, I guess. The post isn’t that long, but it’s because I’ve explained most things in the two hyperlinks above. Nevertheless, today mark’s Neregate’s second birthday : O-tanjoubi omedetou !

Thank you for being here with me, and yoroshiku onepleaseshimasu for the mirai !

Regards,

Your Uncle Zana

Being a lazy ass person who likes to live by the day, this is a good opportunity to list things I am doing/planning on doing for the blog.
Regulars aside, this may be a good chance for you to know what’s coming next on Neregate.






Those who’ve been lurking in here for a while have probably noticed that the PotD category has been taking the spotlight in quite a dramatic way, and for more than a couple months now. Truth is, I haven’t been getting a single day off work for more than a year now (okay, two days, I admit). Needless to say, I have accumulated so much exhaustion that even taking vitamins and sleeping 7-8 hours a day has zero effect(that number is accurate). Simply put, this results in me being in lazy mode when getting home.
I finally managed to take a few weeks off work (not now, but soon). This should allow me to catch up with several things I’ve been neglecting on Neregate for too long.
I know I won’t be able to do everything, but at least it’ll be written in a corner and ready to be worked on when the time is right.

• In the near future :
• v4 of the Summer 2012 Anime Chart

• v1 of the Fall 2012 Anime Chart (need to work on a new design first)

• 1.4.0.0 of Anifetch, with fixes for several broken websites. I was thinking of adding an interactive wizard to help you automatically fill the required fields when adding a new website, too.

• Bringing back the imageboard online.

• Celebrating Neregate’s second birthday ! Two years that I’ve been polluting the place with my lolis.. time flies.

• In the near, but not so near future :
• The “little something” regarding Anime Charts I’ve been talking about for a while now. Some more details can be found in Shinigami-Sama’s interview of Neregate.

• Rework of the subscription emails’ “look and feel”. Right now, I don’t like how emails render in your mailbox. I’m close to hitting one-hundred blog subscribers, so I want to do something a bit more “better looking”. The problem is that emails render differently depending on the Mail Client that you use, so I’ll have some testing to do beforehand.

• Bringing back the “XXX hours ago” part of the “recent comments” widget. I remember having a huge headache when I tried to fix that, long ago. I’ll probably have to code the widget myself, AJAX powered.

• Bringing back editable comments. The current plugin just refuses to work, and I have no idea why.. sucks. This is probably caused by another active plugin though.

• In the TBD future :
• New blog theme. I only talked about it a couple times, but this is something I’ve been considering for a while now. Even though I think I’ve found my new theme already (expensive tho), the amount of time needed to adapt it will be significant. Custom mature content filter, all that stuff..

• Custom-made members area. While I’ve seen numerous requests for registrations on Neregate, right now I don’t think there is any benefit for being a registered member. Because I don’t want anyone besides me to access the wp-admin area, using the built-in wordpress registration system is a simple no.
Why you ask? Two reasons :
The first one being WordPress that keeps finding security holes in its code, with users being able to do more things than they should be able to. While this mostly concerns “authors”, it is a no-no for me.
The second is that when your WordPress database gets deleted, any visitor coming to your blog will see the installation page of WordPress, and be able to register a new blog on your server (and potentially compromise the rest of your network) ! What a nice security hole. This could have happened to me, but hopefully wp-admin access is password-protected on Neregate. This doesn’t guarantee an absolute safety, but surely it’s better than being plainly exposed to the world.

Ranting aside, the main things I want to do with that custom members area are :
> Upload your custom avatar, visible by other users on the blog when you comment (animated png & gif allowed, too)
> Custom blog “Hovercard”, that replaces the default Gravatar Hovercard.
> Statistics : About your presence, time spent on blog, numbers of comments left, ranks (maybe)
> Ability to add other members as friends, send them private messages
> Reply to comments directly from your control panel
> Ability to view all of your followed posts at a glance (and to post a reply to any of them on the fly, using ajax mechanics)
> More filter options for the blog
> And many more features I’ve forgotten

• Create a Neregate mascot. This is a very personal wish of mine, but I’d love to make it happen. I’d have to find both a skilled and willing person to work on it, so this is not an easy requirement (and knowing myself, I’d be picky about both the quality and the design). I’ve thought of this in deeper details already, but no need to write down everything.
• Create a statistics page : Bandwidth usage, clicks, visits, etc.

Well, I’ve probably forgotten several things in that list, but that’s about it for the main ideas.
If you have stuff you’d like to see on Neregate, feel free to tell me about it. Your critics/suggestions are welcome, too.

As always, thanks for your presence and comments; it keeps me and Neregate moving forward.

Regards,

Your Uncle Zana.

For those curious about what we discussed with each other, you can head over to this page to read the interview. Feel free to leave some comments there if you wish, too!

Arigatou, Shinigami-sama

For the little story, the dropdown menu is created by doing an Ajax request to the server (to get the list), and then built from the ground using Javascript. I’ve left the Javascript unminified, in case you want to have a look. I’m no JS expert, but I like the end result.
The menu uses CSS3 for some sexy styling and animation. It’ll degrade nicely if your browser doesn’t support the latest CSS styling tags, so no worries on that side.
Untested on IE (is that a browser anyway?), though it should work as well. You’ll also get a nice warning box if your Javascript is disabled.

Whenever I update a chart, new anime in the list will be marked with a “NEW” animated image next to them. This way, you can quickly know where the new stuff is, without necessarily taking a look at the chart.
I’ve also added two new background images to the main page, to complete the “set”.
The image will change randomly at each pageload.
On the blog side, I’ve modified the “Website” menu on the menubar to add both the Neregate and Baka.bz websites.

I have other plans for the future, like alternative displays for the menu :
Menu > Anime Season > List

Well, this is just an idea for now. Your ideas and critics are more than welcome to expand the functionalities of the service

Feel free to have a look at the new version : baka.bz.
Sharing the base URL of the service now has a real meaning, unlike the previous version.

Side note, but I noticed two holes in the anime index, so I filled them with Train Hero and Beyblade Zero-G. These websites’ redirections won’t work if you pick them.
Also, the “Gakkatsu!” anime has the same code as the Jewelpet TV series. I’ll fix that in the v4.

Now that was a wall of text.