Oh hi there, this is Guu speaking. I’ve been a bit boring lately and I’m sorry about that, but it’s hard when master yonasu can’t help me on his own. What kind of third party does he think I am? Always the same thing, even though we speak the same language, everything has to go through this “Dave guy”. I like Dave though, he’s the one who helps me get dressed and everything, he’s a close friend of mine.
Well, enough of the whining for now, I’m here to show you all my new outfits! My 14 old outfits are getting worn out, so kanpai to these 15 new ones!
Eeh, eh? How do you like them apples? Uh, I mean, oranges! Obviously. Pretty nice, right? My personal favorite is me crossdressing as a ganguro girl, teehee. [click to continue…]
You’ve seen this site getting a lot of updates this month, you can read about the design changes in Very Orange Update and about galleries in Introducing Galleries. But I’m not done yet!
Besides some minor design updates like color shade of the background and sidebar updates, I have three things to talk about today. Let’s begin with the two new pages that you can now see in the site navigation, Events and Japan Blogs.
Events
The events page shows concerts, conventions, idol birthdays and pretty much anything else that is related to Japan and myself. Anyone with an account can add events to the page, but I’m not really expecting anyone to do so^^. It’s mainly there so I can keep track of things easily. It’s a work in progress and nothing special really, but maybe you’ll find it useful too. You’ll definitely find my plans there while I’m in Japan.
Japan Blogs
I made this page for you guys, I’m eventually going to remove my sidebar blogroll because let’s face it, it’s just link love, it’s not really useful and doesn’t generate a lot of clicks. Similar to austrian otaku’s Live Blogroll, I want to show your content, since that generates a lot more clicks. I didn’t want to show just a list however, I wanted images and a nice layout. And as I just a couple of days ago received an invite to a private preview from the kind people at feedly, I decided to roll with their solution. You can also see a normal blogroll below that lists all the featured blogs.
Now of course when I remove the blogroll from my sidebar, I’m going to have to put something else there. Since the space was used to show other blogs, I intend to continue to do that. I’m thinking some kind of rotation of the very same RSS feeds that are featured on this page. Perhaps daily or weekly feeds. But if you have any ideas let me know :)
About Me
The about page is a page that is always a work in progress, and this time I’ve given it a rather big update. Besides editing and adding some text to the introduction, there are five new sections on the page:
- What I Do
A little more about me, what I do and what my goals are.
- Guest Blogging/Collaborations
A list of blogs I am or have written for or have helped in other ways (such as designing and consulting).
- Photography
Basically what I take photos of and what equipment I use.
- My Mascots
A little info about my two mascots.
- History of yonasu.com
A slideshow of previous designs.
You’ll also see that I’ve removed the Profile section, I have however saved my favorites which can be accessed by clicking on my picture.
This is everything I’ve had planned in terms of pages and news, so besides some minor updates to these new pages we’ll probably not see anything new in a while, except for new posts of course!
Lately I’ve been asking people what they are missing here on yonasu.com, and many of those who I have asked have said that they want galleries, more specifically, idol galleries. I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time, but I was never sure on how to do it. Basically I had three options in mind:
- A standalone gallery page, much like Zenphoto.
- An image board like Danbooru, as seen on Safebooru.
- Galleries inside of posts (basically just full-width images within a post).
After messing around with these options in my head I came to the conclusion that any kind of third-party gallery or image board wasn’t what I was looking for. So I was left with galleries inside of posts. If you know of my other blog Amai Sekai, a place where I just dump stuff I want to save, you’ve probably seen huge posts such as 185 Ueto Aya Magazine Scans. There I’m using full-width pictures together with a plugin called Lazy Load that loads pictures as you’re scrolling down the page. Rather than using that for galleries on yonasu.com, I decided to show one big picture and thumbnails for the rest. Now of course that’s not really a good way to browse a gallery, so for browsing you’ll click on any picture in the post and it will open in a lightbox. There are three ways to use this lightbox:
- Click on “Start Slideshow” at the top right of the picture (pictures will show for 2.5 seconds).
- Use your keyboard’s arrow keys to manually browse through all images in a post (my favorite).
- Use your mouse (previous and next buttons will show once you hover your mouse over the picture).
From now on this plugin works for all posts, so not just for the galleries.
Galleries will be found everywhere just like normal posts, you’ll also be able to use a drop down menu in the main navigation at the top of the page. Any questions, suggestions or requests are very much welcome.
The first gallery to be published is a gallery of the 21-year-old actress Yoshitaka Yuriko, an actress who’s been growing on me a lot lately. If you haven’t seen her act, I recommend the movie Hebi ni Piasu (Snakes and Piercings)!
As some of you might know, this blog is running on the Thesis theme. The Thesis theme was recently updated so I was forced (by my own will) to upgrade mine to the latest version. Because I had to mess with my previous customizations a bit I decided to give the site design an upgrade as well.
yonasu.com on Thesis 1.5
The previous design was nice but there was too much white and lacked a sense of uniqueness. I’m continuing to roll with orange as my main color as you can see, dropped some blue and gray, added some black and lighter shades of orange.
The biggest change is the background color and the shadow on the sides, that makes a huge difference. The header navigation is also new and liked by @Jamaipanese^^ The multimedia box seen at the top of the sidebar has been removed until further notice.
Finally I also removed a couple of images from the header rotation, new ones are on the way.
I hope you’ll be able to enjoy this version of yonasu.com as much as me! Suggestions and requests are very much welcome but if orange isn’t your favorite color I can’t really help you right now^^
Edit: I also added a retweet button in posts on the right side of the post title. (Not visible on the front page)
Edit 2: Changed the font from Lucida to Helvetica.
First off I’d like to say thank you to all of you who voted for me in The Battle of The Blogs! Although it’s not really something to boast about, I am still very happy for the support. For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, someone entered my blog to the contest and I ended up as a finalist against xorsyst.com for the title of Best Otaku Blog. I guess the author of the contest doesn’t know of Danny Choo^^ I’m not sure how my blog ended up winning though, because there are so many other blogs that I would put before mine for this title.
Either way, the award doesn’t really mean anything special, but it’s an achievement to me as a blogger seeing as I ended up getting around 80% of the votes. So again, thanks for the support everyone! I’ll try and keep it up as usual, and if you have suggestions or requests about posts or anything regarding this blog, I’m listening (in the comments section^^).
I finally decided to clean my desk and the rest of my so to call office. It’s been 2 months since last time I showed you pictures of my desk but not much have changed since then. I’ve removed the USB hub and replaced the wireless Apple keyboard with a wired and replaced some stuff on the glass shelf. And of course my new friends Kagamikku and Kona-chan! They’re always keeping me company, although Kagamikku is spacing out most of the time, she’s probably having wet dreams about me^^ Danny’s Mirai-chan and Haruka-chan are also keeping me company with the MiraiClock iPhone app!
[click to continue…]
What I have is never enough for me it seems, it has only been 2 months since I last switched to a new theme and here we go again. And of course I’m going to try and explain why I’ve done this right now.
The previous design was pretty popular and I liked it a lot as well, however, there were some issues with it. Ginza (the name of the previous design) doesn’t support IE7 which unfortunately is the most used browser among IE users on my blog. 23% of my readers use IE, and out of those 23% IE7 is the most used browser. And a blog design that doesn’t have support for a browser with that many users just isn’t good, it’s very hard to convert someone to a loyal reader if he/she can’t read the blog. [click to continue…]
Last week I got an email from The Battle of the Blogs that I’ve been entered in a competition against xorsyst for the title Best Otaku Blog. So I thought, hey why not try and win this bad boy?
Last week Tofugu won against Japan Cinema and two other previous winners are TOKYOMANGO and Boing Boing, of course in other categories.
Well, as you’re a reader of my blog, I hope that I’ll get your vote! ;) xorsyst is hard to beat but I’m not giving up without a fight! Click the image above to cast your vote or click this link.
Update: Click to find out who won!
