After days of backing up, moving files, exporting and importing databases and talking to the support team on both the old and the new web host, yonasu.com is finally running smoothly on the new servers. I changed the nameservers yesterday morning however, so it might not work just yet in some parts of the world, as it can take up to 48 hours to update everywhere.
So let’s talk a bit about the current and previous web hosts. yonasu.com was previously running on hosting from One.com using their cheapest option, $1.5/month for 3000 MB space, 1 MySQL database and unlimited everything else (data, FTP, mail accounts etc.). Basically, you get a whole lot of web hosting for 1.5 bucks a month. And their hosting is great, so it’s not like I’ve moved because I’ve had issues with it or anything. My main reason for moving is that you can’t use more than one top-level domain (.com, .net, .org etc.) on one account. So with One.com you’re basically supposed to run only one site per account. This is not the best solution for me as I need to pay for multiple accounts which also makes things more difficult to manage. [click to continue…]
Edit: Sorry, next time I’ll make sure to include a hyperlink xD amaisekai.com
Finally I get to have a good cup of coffee and some peace, renovating the apartment is a drag but we’re almost done. So the latest news is that I’ve launched a new blog, and no, nothing’s going to change here because of that. I call it Amai Sekai (Sweet World) and originally it was intended to be a private blog just for me. Amai Sekai is kind of a Tumblr-like blog, you could also call it an archive blog or simply “the dump”. Basically I’ll post everything I want to save there, such as the girls in the thumbnail below :P
Now I wouldn’t be surprised if someone said that I could just use a bookmarking service like Delicious instead, but too many times have I bookmarked something that has been removed when I need it again. And when I just download stuff to my downloads folder, things get really messy and it’s hard to find stuff since I sure don’t go through the trouble and rename everything so the search engine can find it.
So I decided to launch a blog to solve this issue, and since I do believe that I save a lot of stuff that others might be interested in as well, I decided to make it public. There will be a lot of idol stuff on it but as it’s my own kind of bookmarking-service-tumblr-blog-backup-archive-dump, you’ll find other stuff as well (and not only Japanese things).
This blog is likely to update on a daily basis, sometimes even a few times a day probably. I’m not expecting a large amount of readers/viewers but if you like things I like you might want to give it a gander every once in a while!
Just trying out WordPress for the iPhone. This is a good solution for blogging on the go I think. I had plans on getting an eee PC but they’re still too bulky to always carry around. Although it’s pretty nice now that you can use tethering with the iPhone. Well, I’ll use this for shorter post, I guess a lot like Danny’s Live Blogging feature. I did use something similar in my previous theme for news, don’t remember what I called it back then, but maybe someone else does?^^
If you’ve been blogging for a while you’ve probably had a lot of people stealing your content in various ways. And you’re probably upset about it too. People steal my content every day, be it translations, photos or scraping of my full RSS feed. I used to get very upset about this before, but now I’ve learned to live with it. It’s too time consuming to actually try to do anything about it.
I look at it in a different way now, actually I think it’s pretty stupid for me to get upset about it. And why is that? Basically because I (we) do the exact same thing. We might not be stealing other people’s blog content, but most of us probably use copyrighted photos, download music and other copyrighted material. And that is pretty much the same thing, it’s just a vicious circle of mad people. Nothing good comes out of getting upset about it, period.
Ask yourself, do you really have the right to be mad about it? Do you respect other people’s rights?
So instead of getting upset about it, look at it as an opportunity to grow and reach a new audience. It’s your content so you can do exactly what you want with it. Watermark your photos, link to your site inside posts, do everything you can to make sure that people who are looking at your content from somewhere else, will know that they’re not looking at the original source. Sure, other sites might make a few bucks by using your content, but it’s also free advertising for you, if you take use of the opportunity. If people like what they read, there’s a big chance they’ll check your site out, if they know where your site is located.
This applies to artists too (or the labels in charge). They can either be be upset about their CDs appearing on torrent sites, or they can think of it as free marketing. The CD itself isn’t the only thing you can make money with, use it to advertise the artist and sell other stuff. Just look at some of the big Japanese artists like Koda Kumi and Hamasaki Ayumi, A LOT of people download their CDs but they probably make gazillions of dollars by selling t-shirts, hoodies, slippers, plushies, fans, photocards, tape, you name it.
The Japanese are very clever when it comes to getting the most out of their fans.
It’s all about using it as an opportunity, look at it differently, be happy.
A few tips for bloggers who are fighting RSS scraping sites:
- Don’t fight them, use them.
- Watermark your photos.
- If you’re linking to pages on you own site, open them in the current window instead of a new one. That will lead people off the scraping site.
- Use FeedBurner FeedFlare.
This was taken on a site that scrapes my full RSS feed. The FeedFlare is automatically embedded at the end of every post. You can freely choose what you want to have in the FeedFlare. If your blog is new or just doesn’t do very well on search engines, these sites can be a big threat to you as they’ll get visitors that should end up on your blog. So if your blog is new, it’s even more important to do everything you can to let those visitors know that the’re not where they should be. I’ve been blogging for a while now and I hit fairly well on search engines, none of the scraping sites hit higher than my own blog, but it’s still important for me to do whatever I can, as people can miss my entries when searching.
This came to mind after all of our discussions about fansubbing and whether fansubbers should allow their translations to be used on streaming sites. I’m interested in hearing your thought on this, do you get mad if people steal your content? What do you do about it?
Came across this plugin for WordPress earlier today. It’s a very useful plugin which checks for broken links and images in your posts. It’s especially good to use if you’re moving to WordPress from another platform, I just realized that there are still a few links leading to my old Blogger blog that needs to be updated.
It runs in the background so you can just let it do its job and check the links whenever you want to. You can change the link checking intervals and you get notifications on the dashboard. It also checks your pages!
Download it here
Enjoy!
Yesterday night, I went to 
