Just a reminder that our donation drive is still ongoing since we haven’t reached our minimum goal yet.  As of the time I write this, we have $994.57 and need at least $1600, this will cover hosting at our current levels through the end of June.  If we get another $600 in donations on top of that (for a total of $2200) we’ll add an additional server as well.

For more detailed info on the donation drive please see my original post and if you’d like to donate please go to our donations page.

Donation Meter Plugin

We have a donation meter plugin that’ll let you add the donation meter to your sidebar and have it update automatically.  If you’d like to add this to your blog just save the plugin file and change the extension from .txt to .php.  Now upload this file to your wp-content/plugins directory.  Then you activate it and add the following code to your sidebar wherever you want it to appear:

< ? php dd_display(170); ?>

The number specifies how many pixels wide the donation meter should be, so change the 170 to something slightly less than your sidebar’s width.  The plugin outputs all the necessary code, with the header being an <h2> and the meter itself enclosed in <ul> tags.  (We chose these because they’re the most common.)  If you need to change these you’ll need to edit the plugin code to do so, but it’s really straightforward.  There’s also a set of sayings that the plugin will randomly put below the donation meter itself, here’s the default ones:

$sayings[] = 'Just a bit more guys!';
$sayings[] = 'It can\'t hurt to help!';
$sayings[] = 'Be a pal, a PayPal!';
$sayings[] = 'We need money. Badly. ';
$sayings[] = 'Keep us in business.';
$sayings[] = 'Feel good; lend a hand.';


Feel free to change these or add new ones if you’d like.   (Note: single quote marks in the text will need to have a \ in front of them.)

Demographics Survey

And finally, if you haven’t taken our demographics survey yet, please do, it’ll help us out as we work on selling ads directly.  For full information on the survey check out my post on it.  This is something everyone can do since it only takes a minute or two of your time and doesn’t cost anything.

Here’s a chance for you to help AnimeBlogger.net out and all it’ll take is a small amount of your time.   We’re doing a demographics survey to get a better idea of the make up of AB’s audience.  When trying to sell ads it’s important to have this information as companies will ask about your visitors demographics, so having this information will help us when it comes to selling advertising directly.  Even if we turn the management of the ads over to a company who specializes in such things, we’ll still need to know our audience demographics.  (Ad companies want demographics because they use them to target ads to the audience(s) more likely to purchase the product(s) they’re advertising.)

The survey is short, only 14 questions long, and should take you no more than a minute to fill out.  All results are completely anonymous, we aren’t asking for any personally identifying data.  You can find the survey here.

Also don’t forget about our donation drive, we’re already more than halfway to our minimum goal of $1600! A big thank you to everyone who’s donated so far, it’s appreciated more than I can possibly put into words. ^_^

AnimeBlogger.net has always been supportive of new writers all over the world to establish their blog for free. As we continue to expand and include new bloggers to the anime blogosphere, we have reached a point where advertising dollars are not enough to pay for the hosting services.

Hence, we have decided to appeal for donations to cover the taxes and hosting fees of AnimeBlogger.net. The first goal is to raise US$1600 to cover three months of hosting and the taxes applicable to AnimeBlogger.net. When we have secured that amount, we are looking into adding another server in order to accommodate more writers, which is where the second goal comes in.  If we reach our second goal of US$2200, we’ll be able to add another server.

If you are wondering how you can donate to us, there are various ways. First, you can directly donate to the site via Amazon or Paypal from our donations page. Second, you can buy AnimeBlogger.net merchandise.  As an incentive to those who donate, everyone who donates more than $5 will be entered to win a prize. Currently we have a sponsor that’s paying for two AnimeBlogger.net shirts for winners. You can also contribute any anime-related items as prizes for the lucky draw.

AnimeBlogger.net needs your help. Everyone is integral to the support of AnimeBlogger.net. Every little bit counts to hit our target, be it $1 or $100. You will make a difference. Thank you and please continue to explore our anime blogging community!

Donation Meter Plugin

We encourage you to let others know about AB’s donation drive, and to help with that we have a Wordpress plugin available that you can use to put a donation meter on your sidebar.  The donation meter shows the the current donation amount in green, a bar extends out to the first goal in red, then the second goal’s in yellow.  The plugin pulls its data from our servers so it’ll update itself as we get donations in.

To install the plugin on your blog, first download the plugin.  (You can also view the source of the plugin.)  Next extract the file from the zip archive and upload that file to your wp-content/plugins directory.  Then you activate the plugin and add the following code to your sidebar wherever you want it to appear:

< ?php dd_display(170); ?>

The number specifies how many pixels wide the donation meter should be, so change the 170 to something slightly less than your sidebar’s width.  The plugin outputs all the necessary code, with the header being an <h2> and the meter itself enclosed in <ul> tags.  (We chose these because they’re the most common.)  If you need to change these you’ll need to edit the plugin code to do so, but it’s really straightforward.  Finally, there’s a set of sayings that the plugin will randomly put below the donation meter itself, here’s the default ones:

$sayings[] = 'Just a bit more guys!';
$sayings[] = 'It can\'t hurt to help!';
$sayings[] = 'Be a pal, a PayPal!';
$sayings[] = 'We need money. Badly. ';
$sayings[] = 'Keep us in business.';
$sayings[] = 'Feel good; lend a hand.';


Feel free to change these or add new ones if you’d like.   (Note: single quote marks in the text will need to have a \ in front of them.)

There’s going to be a bit of downtime tonight and tomorrow for maintenance.  First off, this Friday, February 8, starting at 22:00 PST (06:00 GMT February 9th) there will be some downtime while the main server cluster AB is hosted on is moved from one data center to a different one.  This outage is expected to last up to 8 hours, and will hopefully be finished by 06:00 PST (14:00 GMT) on February 9th.  This outage will effect most blogs on AnimeBlogger.net and will also affect the Forums and Antenna.

Secondly, one of our dedicated servers will be down for some electrical maintenance, the transformer that supplies power to the hosting company has to be taken offline for 3 to 5 hours to repair a “high voltage elbow“.  This is semi-emergency maintenance, there was a fire in a nearby building recently, and upon inspecting all the transformers in the area the electric company found several needing repairs.  Work is scheduled to begin around 08:00 CST (13:00 GMT) and will take anywhere from 3 to 5 hours, hopefully more towards the lower end.  This outage will affect the blogs on that dedicated server (which are most of the bigger blogs besides Random Curiosity), the main site and my blog.

We apologize for the inconvenience!

This is just a quick note to let everyone who’s waiting on an account know what’s going on.  Last month we first had server problems which were caused by our combined sites using too much CPU time and crashing the server.  I finally got that fixed (mainly by moving some people off to another server) and then my health took a turn for the worse and I spent about two weeks unable to spend much time on the computer at all.  Needless to say this has got new account creation way behind.

There’s still a bit of a problem with CPU load on the server, adding too many new accounts at once would not be a good idea.  The good news is I think we’ll be able to upgrade our hosting shortly so this will cease to be an issue, in the meantime I’ll be going ahead and creating accounts for everyone who’s already received a reply to their hosting request (you’ll know if you received it, it asks you for the sitename and what type of E-mail account you want if any).  I’ll be sending this reply out to the rest of the pending requests soon, but there will be a delay before I can start actually creating those accounts.

If you know someone who’s waiting for an account that might not read my blog, please let them know about this post.  Thanks!

I’m running short this month and am cutting it close on having enough money to pay my health insurance premium (which if not paid on time I lose for good thanks to how coverage under COBRA works) so I’m selling some of my anime and manga stuff that I can bear to part with to help raise some money.  Since I need the money quickly I prefer payment by Paypal, but am not totally against other forms of payment so you can ask if you’d like.  (Please E-mail me (Note: you will need to remove the obviously extra text from the address before you can send) to ask.)  I’ll probably be adding some more stuff to this over the weekend so you might want to check back.   As things are sold I’ll indicate that they’re no longer available as well.  Anything I can’t sell directly I’ll most likely put up on eBay later.  Shipping will be whatever the actual shipping costs are and I will ship internationally.  Just E-mail me to let me know what you want.

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AnimeBlogger.net is proud to announce version 2.1 of their Antenna aggregator, with lots of new features focusing on customization of feeds and the interface.  Customization features require registering for a free account and being logged in, but you’ll be able to make the Antenna display posts from only the feeds, blogs and channels that you want to see!  Read on for more detailed information on the changes and additions.

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We received a total of 11 great entries for the Mascot Design Contest and deciding the winner is going to be tough!  I thought I’d do a couple of posts showing off all the entries.  I’m not going to comment on the individual entries as I don’t want to give away which entries I’m leaning towards as the winner myself, but feel free to comment on them if you’d like.  I’ll be announcing the winners in the next day or two.  Everyone who entered did a great job.   Entries are being posted in the order they were received, the first 6 were posted yesterday and these are the final 5 entries.  I’ve linked the site for entries where I know the artist’s site.  If I don’t have your site linked and you’d like it linked please send me an E-mail and let me know where to link and I’ll be happy to edit the post and add the link.   All entries have been cropped to remove whitespace and resized to be 450px wide, still they take up about 600KB so if you’re on a slow connection it make take a while to download the page.  Full names of entrants aren’t given to respect their privacy.  Entries are displayed after the jump.

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We received a total of 11 great entries for the Mascot Design Contest and deciding the winner is going to be tough!  I thought I’d do a couple of posts showing off all the entries.  I’m not going to comment on the individual entries as I don’t want to give away which entries I’m leaning towards as the winner myself, but feel free to comment on them if you’d like.  Everyone who entered did a great job.   Entries are being posted in the order they were received, I’ll post the first 6 entries today and the rest tomorrow.  I’ve linked the site for entries where I know the artist’s site.  If I don’t have your site linked and you’d like it linked please send me an E-mail and let me know where to link and I’ll be happy to edit the post and add the link.   All entries have been cropped to remove whitespace and resized to be 450px wide, still they take up about 600KB so if you’re on a slow connection it make take a while to download the page.  Full names of entrants aren’t given to respect their privacy.  Entries are displayed after the jump.

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If you’re planning on entering our Mascot Design Contest today’s the final day to enter!  Entries must be in by 23:59 GMT today to be considered for the contest.  I’ve sent a reply to everyone who’s entered to let them know their entries were received, so if you haven’t received a reply then we haven’t received your entry.  We’ve received several great entries so far, it’s going to be tough deciding the winner.