It's a bit late, but it's been about one month since I started this blog, and I've thus far had a great time of it. (No, really, it's been just over one month; the first post in this blog was made on January 26th, and I originally planned to post this on the last day of February.)

From various well-worn chestnuts of wisdom from more experienced bloggers on #AnimeBlogger, the litmus test of whether a blog will survive to prosper for at least the foreseeable future is that one-month mark: if a blog is still being worked on and actively updated after one month since creation, it has apparently passed some sort of trial by the unrelenting fires of apathy, and will live happily ever after or something like that. Now, considering that I've decided to undertake the Card Captor Sakura Project and blog the entire 70-episode series (and two movies), that gives me over two months' worth of posts at least, assuming I suddenly lose all need for sleep and post once a day like unto clockwork. Taking into consideration all the missed days and such, I may well be here until next year posting nothing but CCS episode summaries and still not be done.

It is a terrifying thought.

But one month is one month, and to celebrate this momentous occasion, I'll use this opportunity to ramble on about various statistics for this blog up to this point, in a dastardly and cunning plan to nonchalantly segue into something that almost nobody cares about.

- I spent three days trying to decide on the Wordpress theme to use, that would give off the feel of moe. I finally ended up with the Pool theme, and it was only after I had the blog up and running for a week or so that I was told that this was apparently a very, very popular theme among new anime blogs using Wordpress. Well, I can understand that; it's clean and uses soft colours, and it's quite easy on the eyes.

In all honesty, the Pool theme was my second choice. My first was something called Think Pink, but it seemed as though the available download was perpetually corrupted. I may or may not switch themes in the future, but since that requires making a whole new header image, I'll probably stick with this one for a while longer.

- The header image was made with all sorts of unnecessary procedures. I wanted a random picture of Tomoyo Daidouji from Card Captor Sakura with a camcorder, and the first scene that came to mind (possibly because I used it in an AMV) was episode 56, with Sakura and Tomoyo in maid uniforms for the cafe their class was running in the school festival.

Now, AMV-making had proven to me that DVD quality isn't really all that great, without some filtering. So I ripped just that video chapter from the DVD, clipped out that one scene in lossless AVI, applied the filters I usually used (AVISynth is hard) to that clip, then took a screenshot. So now I had a marginally nicer-looking screenshot that would probably not have needed all that effort if I had learned how to do it all in an image manipulation program. Erasing the background (never learned how to Extract Foreground Image in GIMP) was trivial by comparison.

Yes, Tomoyo is flipped horizontally, and now she looks left-handed. It's easier than, um, finding another image, or something. Yeah, I'm lazy.

- I get most of my hits from the AB.net antenna post aggregator. Most visitors come from the US (56.6%), with the runners-up being Canada (4.9%) and Singapore (4.65%). The most common browser used is Firefox 2.0.0.1 with 21.03% of the hits, with Internet Explorer 6.0 catching up at 13.38% and the 5.5 version at 11.78%.

- The most popular entry by far is my post about the Jun-centric Happiness OVA, with over 1200 non-unique hits (compared to the runner-up at about 200). A great deal of this is twofold: firstly, searching for "watarase jun no kareinaru ichinichi" (with or without quotes) on Google as of a week after I posted that entry would have yielded only that entry as a result. Searching for "happiness ova" around that time period would also have yielded my entry on the first results page, and it would be the only relevant link (the others were about non-Happiness OVAs or people misspelling "over" as "ova").

The second reason for the popularity was when an entry by jaalin on Omni's blog linked to me. Now, Omni has one of the most (if not the most) popular anime blogs out there. (With good reason, to my mind.)

The net result was that four days after the link from Omni's blog, I saw the (non-unique) hits on that post break the 1000 barrier. It's kind of a scary feeling to have something written on a whim suddenly turn out to be scrutinized by so many people.

- The most common search string used to find this blog is gadget trial, which I assume would lead one to this quick review of the game.

- The longest search string used to find this blog is anime guy that turns into a girl falls in love with a guy. I can only surmise that they found that Jun OVA post.

- The most disturbing search string used to find this blog is "I've never had a girlfriend" suicide, in exactly that form. I'm not entirely sure what to think about that. A close runner-up was tentacle loli, and I can probably see why.

- For the first poll of the blog, there were 43 total votes. 2% voted "No", 12% countered with "Yes", another 12% hedged "Maybe", and 74% felt the need to inform me "Pie". These are the sort of people who read this blog, evidently.

Thanks for reading this far, and thanks for visiting Moe Check!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 at 5:51 pm and is filed under admin, off-topic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.