Once in a while, I do some random searches for information that wasn’t available before. This time, I found a very exciting piece of information that I have been waiting for several months to become true. And that is a new season of Haruhi! With 10 light novels of the series, and only 1 and a half of those novels having been covered in the original Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, there was no way a second season (or even more) can be ignored in lieu of the famdom the series has created so far.

Anyway, the proof of the second season can be found in this image:

The image is a reference to Volume 3’s short story “Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody”. The story involves the Tanabata festival, celebrated on July 7th each year. Haruhi asks the Brigade to write down wishes and post them on a bamboo shoot. The top image shows her looking out the window. In the novel, she’s sitting on a chair stairing out the window, but this is close enough. Below are live-action shots of a promotion video put on my Kyoto Animation that portrays the events in the short story. Basically, Kyon is taken back to the past (exactly 3 years ago) by Asahina. Asahina is put to sleep by an older version of herself who awaits for Kyon in the past. The older Asahina instructs Kyon to help Haruhi paint the symbol on the school field that Tanaguchi talked about when describing Haruhi’s past junior high antics. So, it turns out Kyon actually helped Haruhi paint the symbol for her that night.

It’s still not revealed what exactly the second season will cover, but who cares? Season 2 is confirmed! There is a god.

Well, I just paid for another 14 months of webhosting to keep this site up. It’s just too bad I don’t know what else to add to this place. I’ve been debating with myself if I should have done it. But for $6.45 a month to have my own domain and plenty of diskspace and bandwidth, the interest alone from my savings account already has this covered.

In terms of what I can do to keep me busy with this website, I could add downloadable content, but downloadable content that’s popular is usually illegal. So scratch that. I could start doing reviews on things, such as games, but I don’t have enough money or time to buy and play all those games; not to mention, game reviews are well taken care of by other websites. Now the biggest thing could be to just document my life, like all those other blogging sites. It’s probably the easiest thing to do, but that’s boring. No one reads about other people’s lives.

I’ve even thought of putting up my artwork online. I’ve already put up a few, but maybe I should start doing more of that. The easiest transition would be to draw comics. Unfortunately, the time investment is just too overwhelming, and I can’t seem to draw the same character to look exactly the same each time. I should work on that.

Well, I guess in the meantime, it should be more anime, more music videos when I find the inspiration to do so, and the occasional mind rant such as this one when I’m bored.

So for the last week, while I was tracking the traffic coming into my website, I noticed traffic coming in from this one particular site. And I really don’t want to say who it is because that will help them in their page ranking, so I’ll give you their website spelled backwards (ofni.srewsnatset). Anyway, I noticed this site led to my own site while I was viewing my web statistics and I had no reason why they were doing that until I searched for their domain online and noticed that their main domain led to my page while it had set up modules elsewhere on their site with Google Ads. So basically, they were using my content to increase their pagerank and potentially gain revenue off the traffic gain on the ads. Bullshit, I tell you.

What did I do about all this? Well I tried disabling hotlinking, but it didn’t quite seem to work. Then I tried .htaccess, but it didn’t work out very well either. But somehow, it created a rift of synchronization between their page and my page and from there I was able to pinpoint how exactly this other page was producing my page. So I made a simple change, and now they’re getting this page instead of my page:
(http://www.ninenines.net/suckitbitches.html)

Ah, revenge is sweet.

This weekend was brutal. I spent a majority of my Saturday racking my brain over some ActonScript code that refused to cooperate with me. The original code moved elements in the x-axis. I needed elements to move in the y-axis. The code pretty much labeled everything with a ._x on it so changing every occurrence of ._x to ._y should be easy right? Well, it was the right logic. Unfortunately, after changing all the values, nothing worked. After 2 hours of looking through my original file and the new file and looking all the way back to the first tutorial that taught me the original effect, I finally started understanding what was going wrong. So I corrected it all. Everything. Then, for sure, I knew I had something that would work. Too bad it didn’t and I was getting frustrated. The code was right. Everything was right.

A few hours later, after searching online for solutions, I gave up on them too, because everyone wanted something close to what I wanted, but completely different at the same time. So in an act of frustration, I deleted everything and started all over again. Originally, I had all the designs ready and nice graphics and so forth. I put them all aside and decided to make sure that what I was doing worked first, and then add on the eye candy. I did everything from scratch. Instead of copying and pasting the original ActionScript codes I had from an older working file, I transcribed the code word by word onto the new file. And then I tested the movie. This time, it finally fucking worked. So why didn’t it work before? I have no idea. Then I spent more hours tweaking everything to what I wanted and finally I accomplished what I had set out to do, with enough time to enjoy my weekend.

Here’s the finished result. You might want to resize it to original size.

Project

Well, not too long ago, I wrote that my page was fully validated as XHTML 1.0 transitional. Unfortunately, I stumbled upon a new plugin that I just don’t want to pass up on just because of XHTML correctness. So, fuck that shit, I’m going for what works for me. I guess I should strikeout the other post then. Anyway, the plugin’s called lightbox and it opens up an image right on top of the page so you don’t have to leave the page to view an image and so forth. Very convenient. Screw XHTML. Now I just need to update all my image posts when I get the chance… Well, maybe I’ll just add it in proactively instead of retroactively.

I can’t believe how far I’ve fallen behind on the times when it comes to HTML and XHTML. 8 years’ worth, but maybe that’s because I haven’t really been paying attention to it all. But I have this feeling that if my page is not XHTML validated, then search engines are going to refuse to list my pages. And in today’s world, it’s all about SEO, no matter how seemingly insignificant things may be. Call me paranoid, but I would like to have a better ranking on Google despite how the current search results on Google lead many to believe that Google sucks these days. I remember when they could find anything and everything. These days, Yahoo! is actually pulling ahead in regards to actually bringing me search results that I actually wanted to find, instead of a front page full of crap from Google.

Anyway, behold! Validated! (as if I just passed my driver’s license test for the first time)

You can check if the current page is validated too. Just look for the “Valid XHTML” link on the right navigation panel. Hopefully, this new page meets the correct coding.

And it took me a couple of hours to get everything “Transitional”. It was good thing, though, that I didn’t have too many posts to go through. While cleaning up my site, I noticed my new theme was causing display problems for a number of my posts, so my next step is to fix those. Sigh. All for the love of perfection.

4-15-07 Update

I decided to use a new plugin, so this information is incorrect at the present time. Oh well. You can read why I threw all the effort out the window.
(http://www.ninenines.net/ninesblog/index.php/blog/2007/xhtml-invalid-again)

Ah yes, it’s another design update to my site. I can’t seem to find one that I like, because everything I use seems to have something great about them, but always lacking in something else. So I spent a better part of today and some time yesterday modifying a particular theme to produce something I was happy with. I’m sure I’ll stick with this layout for maybe a month before I change the header image. And just so I remember which theme I’m talking about, here are some images of what I’m talking about.

Here’s the overall look at the page layout without any of the dynamic text.

Here’s a simplified deep layer of the theme. You can see how many extra parts are included in the final theme.

While designing a new banner for my webpage, I started messing around with the image and came out with this cool silhouette image. Just another one of those spur of the moment things.

Finally I’ve got these damn permalinks working. If you don’t know what they are, permalinks are basically the static URL links for the pages and posts that I add to this site. Unfortunately, they are pretty ugly because they leave ‘?’ marks, ‘=’ signs and numbers in the address. And from what I hear, ugly links are what search engines stay away from because they are typically associated with automatically generated pages. So after several hours of researching and tweaking, I’ve cleaned up my page to show clean pages. I’m sure that while you’re reading this, the URL above probably reads /blog/2007/working-permalinks/ which is a lot cleaner than some symbols and numbers. Plus it’s pretty informative before even looking at the content.

Although I’m sure someone’s going to stumble upon this place looking for help, I don’t do well writing long, informative tutorials detailing how I managed to get clean permalinks working here. But I guess I should do a little bit of it. Since I’m running this on Wordpress, I first read up on their documentation, which was very confusing and didn’t really help. Then I searched their support section, and read what others had to say about it. In conclusion, I went with the most common solution. I was doubtful that it would work, but it did. After doing some cleanup work, it’s all good now.

I was afraid that the real links would be all fucked up and all the pages cached in on Google and so forth would be broken. Luckily, the old links still work. These new permalinks are just for show. In reality, people coming here fail to realize that this is just a simple redirection trick generated by Wordpress. Very sneaky.