I overhauled Birdangel.net. This time I decided to play around with Drupal, a content management system.

I put the finishing touches on the Fighting Gobblers Guild website today. This was the first time that I had ever used PHP Nuke. I ran into some bumps along the way but I have learned a lot about using it.

So after the whole Basic Account debacle, LiveJournal has just announced that they are adding a new type of account: Sponsored. Sponsored will have the same features as a Paid account, but will have certain types of ads on it.

...so wait, they removed Basic Accounts because their three types of accounts were confusing, and now they are adding another type of account? Now we have accounts that are ad-free, have ads, or have sponsored ads? Okay...

I should probably re-make my own weblog soon. I'll keep cloning posts here because Friends pages are so convenient. I wonder if it's worth porting all of my posts that are here to the weblog.

LiveJournal - We Know Drama.

Apparently yesterday, March 12, 2008, SUP, the owner of LiveJournal, took the ability to make new Basic Accounts away. Basic Accounts are accounts with minimal features but no ads -- the same type of account that I use. They changed this without announcing it on any sort of news feed; they quietly noted in their FAQ that new users would no longer be able to create Basic Accounts and that was about it. Brad, the original creator of LiveJournal, who now serves on LiveJournal's Advisory board noted and opposed this change. The VP of Product Development responded to him with this:

From a product perspective it was more about creating a new registration process that was easier for new users to understand. I'm sure it's been ages since many of you signed up for an account, but it was quite confusing and included a table of options that was not very inviting to new users.

For new users to the site, the options of either having an ad-supported journal or the option to pay $20 annually for more (2GB) photo storage, more userpics, and ad-controls seems like a much simpler and easy to understand work-flow. We are working hard to add even more features and are currently revisiting our ad-supported strategy to find ways to deliver more user value in a way that isn't crass.

So basically, they took away the ability to create Basic Accounts entirely because creating an account was confusing for new users. YARITE. If that were the case there would still be a way to make a new Basic Account somewhere.

Today, after people noticed what they had done, they owned up to it and actually announced it on News. Somehow I guess they weren't expecting people to notice the change.

I'm not too pleased about this turn of events. I used to have a paid account, but went back to a basic account after awhile. SUP could eventually someday decide to turn basic accounts into Plus accounts -- accounts with ads. I don't want that; I'd sooner remake my blog elsewhere than have ads on it.

We still have internet. Horray! I am a happy camper.

I am still keeping notes on all the things we've seen and done so that I can write up a comprehensive Japan trip post when I get back. We also figured out a general schedule of what days we are going to see certain places.

Last night, since I had about four hours to kill, I worked on wishlists for my priest, hunter, warrior, and druid. I have to say, I am pretty annoyed about the complete lack of good, comprehensive fansites for WoW. Coming from the anime fandom, I am used to very indepth websites that covered just about anything you would want to know about a series or character. Even character "shrines" were very indepth and could tell you tiny details like which episodes a character appeared in.

Mainly, I am annoyed about the lack of comprehensive hunter websites. I was working on my hunter's wishlist and I was using Kaliban's Class Loot Lists as a guide. It is one of the few really good WoW websites out there because it lists a lot of gear options for each class, even for different specs within a class. However, I don't just want to know all of my options for a certain piece of gear, I want to know which one is the best. This website doesn't order gear in order from best to worst. The Armory sort of does, but it still has a lot of bugs in it. This website is more of what I am talking about, but it's only for druid gear. I want a website like that for hunters. I want a website that will order gear in a list for me from best to worst so that I can find the ideal upgrades for my hunter.

On a more broad note, hunter websites are simply lacking. WoW websites in general are lacking, but I will focus on hunters for the time being. Let's look at TKA Something. It has a guide on pets, pet skills, and a short list of "guides." Where is the comprehensive info? Where is a page about what attributes you should look for in gear based on spec, where is a gear list? Where is a page about what exactly to do when you solo, what exactly to do when you instance? How about a description of hunter lore?

Let's look at the list of Hunter Class Guides on Blizzard's official website. Three of the guides aren't even hunter websites; they are simply guides that are part of a bigger website: Warcraft Revolution, TenTonHammer, and WoWVault. If you look at Warcraft Revolution, it is a one-page guide giving a short paragraph about the hunter class, really simple information about starting a hunter such as what races it can be and what weapons it can use, and a very very very short description of some hunter skills. It doesn't even include all hunter skills. Most of the other websites are like this. The other links on Blizzard's webpage are either links to forum posts or links to one-page guides about one particular thing, such as the Chain Trapping guide.

Now, you may be thinking that the obvious solution would be for me to make a website of my own. There are two problems with that solution. The first, is that I am not very knowledgeable about hunters at all. That's why I am looking for information on them in the first place. The second, is that I hate the hunter class. It's my least favorite WoW class. Yes, I have one, but it's because my eventual goal is to have a max level character of each class. So far I have a 70 druid, 70 hunter, 70 priest, 68 warrior, 64 paladin, 64 rogue, 64 mage, and a 27 warlock. Maybe I will eventually make a WoW website, but we'll see. My standards are high and I never can reach my own standards.

Well, it seems like talk of the LiveJournal events has died down, although it's still very much on my mind. It may seem silly to some to worry about something like this, but I will tell you why I am still concerned. LiveJournal/SixApart still has yet to address what we are and are not allowed to post in our LiveJournals and what we are and are not allowed to list as interests. They still have not addressed why they seemingly changed their own TOS without telling their userbase and then issued suspensions based on the new TOS that no one had (or still has) access to. I want to know why you can be suspended for listing something as an interest when you don't necessarily support it, you are merely interested in it, hence the word "interest." If I have the "Holocaust" listed as an interest, it doesn't mean I support it, all it means is that I am interested in it. LiveJournal/SixApart has yet to address this, and I will continue to be concerned about it until they do.

Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal, apparently no longer works for LiveJournal. This is in conflict to what the Barak, the CEO of Six Apart said, which was Brad is on vacation, and he is filling in his absence.

This makes me feel uneasy. So apparently, and I am probably making incorrect assumptions, but it seems Brad left the company quietly, and now this Barak fellow is the one calling the shots. This time, he called them rather poorly. I am kind of afraid for LiveJournal's future. Brad really did a good job with it, and I liked his vision for LiveJournal. I'm not sure I like the Six Apart vision of LiveJournal. Six Apart has really commercialized LiveJournal and now feels it needs to cater to the advertisers rather than its users. That is completely unlike Brad's original vision of LiveJournal, which was community-centered and ad-free.

Let me say again that the last paragraph is full of assumptions, and is probably full of inaccuracies. Just wanted to say that before anyone crucified me. :P

It's too bad. Even if LiveJournal is going in a direction I don't like, it still is the best weblogging website out there. If I were to leave LiveJournal, the only real option for me would be to remake my weblog on birdangel.net.

I updated BirdAngel.net. It is not much, I re-added the Japanese Media page, added a link to my LiveJournal now that I think I have made it public-safe, and I added a spreadsheet for Tsukii's Professions to the World of Warcraft page.

I spent some time today updating that spreadsheet with the new Outland recipes. My goal was to find an enchanting formula that I could use to skill up my Enchanting skill. Currently, Tsukii's Enchanting skill is 365. In order to get it that high, I had to do a lot of Enchant Gloves - Major Strength, which uses 12 Arcane Dust and 1 Greater Planar Essence. The 12 Arcane Dust is what hurts, in addition to the fact that I had to use this formula to skill up even when it was of yellow skill level, which means it did not always give me a skill-up point. Using up 12 Arcane Dust and not getting a point really hurts.

However, that enchant is now of green skill level, which means it will rarely get me a skill-up point. I have two enchants of orange skill level: Enchant Gloves - Major Spellpower and Enchant Ring - Spellpower. Orange skill level is always guaranteed to give you a skill-up point. However, the materials for the enchants are really expensive. Enchant Gloves - Major Spellpower requires 6 Greater Planar Essence, 6 Large Prismatic Shards, and 6 Primal Mana. Enchant Ring - Spellpower requires 8 Large Prismatic Shards and 8 Greater Planar Essence. I have two enchants that are of yellow skill level: Enchant Gloves - Major Healing and Enchant Weapon - Major Spellpower. Their material components are nearly identical to the ones I just listed, so they are also very expensive.

My goal in the spreadsheet was to try to find an enchant that I am missing that would be good for skill-ups: orange or yellow skill level, with a fairly cheap material cost. Unfortunately, it seems that all of the enchants that I am missing are just as expensive. I am not sure if I should continue trying to skill up on Enchant Gloves - Major Strength, even though it will most likely not get me points, or if I should skill up on an expensive orange skill level enchant. I think I am leaning towards using the expensive orange skill level one, specifically Enchant Ring - Spellpower.

By the way, I made that WoW icon for LiveJournal, but it is rather uninspired.

I returned to Blacksburg Friday night. Since both Rob and I were exhausted from all the wedding planning this past week, we spent Saturday and Sunday just chilling. I played WoW on Sunday and dinged level 70 on my druid. Yes, I said I was going to give WoW up until I got a job, but I really ran out of things to do that weren't WoW. Also, Rob said I could play. So in lieu of giving up WoW entirely, I have majorly cut back on my playtime. So far, this has worked out well.

Another thing I did this weekend was finish tagging all of my LiveJournal posts. Yes, all of them. Yes, I am crazy. Today I have started to manually post entries from my Pita blog days. I am hoping that once I get all of the Pita entries into LiveJournal, I will have all of my weblog posts ever written on here. However, I may be missing a few from when I was using b2 but not the b2-to-LiveJournal plugin. If that is the case, I should have birdangel.net's database backed up and it should be possible to get the missing entries. It's just going to be a pain.

Well, six months later, I've finally gotten rid of the "Coming Soon" picture on birdangel.net. It's still very barren, but this is how I want it for now. I haven't really decided what I want on it. But at least I finally have a website for now.

Edit: Part of me is debating getting a username change for my LiveJournal username. I have had this username for forever, but the name is very clumsy and feels middle schoolish to me (which would make sense, since I made this LiveJournal back in high school).

I never knew I had call waiting on my cellphone! You learn something new every day.

In other news, I finally got off my butt and started working on BA.net's layout. As usual, the CSS is kicking my butt. I'm trying very hard this time to try and figure out the problems on my own instead of asking for help. I'm not sure how long I will last before I cave. :P I wish that CSS could read my mind and behave how I want it to.

It's been kind of interesting working on the layout on the laptop as opposed to my desktop. My laptop, as I discovered last night, doesn't have Paint Shop Pro installed. Ack! The CDs are back in Blacksburg. Usually I start out by making the graphics first, and then coding the layout, but this time I've had to code the layout first, and I'll make the graphic when I get back. I kind of cheated, though -- I just resized the graphic from the old layout to be my "working" graphic until I get a real one.

The other part that is interesting about working from my laptop is that I don't have a very good bookmarks list on this computer. So when I needed CSS help, I dug into my website files and found my old web links page. Thank you, past-me! I was surprised to discover how out of date most of my links are. Thankfully, I found what I needed. I'm still stuck on one part of the CSS, though, so I'm still trying to figure that out. (Why doesn't CSS listen to me when I type height: 100%;? Sigh.)

I was on the phone with a representative from one of the reception sites that we are looking at. When I told her the date, she informed me that May 19th falls on Preakness Weekend, and that I might want to move the date because it is going to be hard to get rooms for out of town guests. Thankfully, we don't have many out of town guests. I know on my side of the family we only have 2 out of towners that might have to spend the night, and we might just have them stay at my house. However, Rob's and my friends may want rooms. Hmm. I'm not willing to move the date, though. =P

In other news, I am still trying to get myself to work on BA.net. The layout is what's making me avoid it, but I think I have a few more ideas now. I kind of like the layout of this website. Let me stress that I like the layout but not the colors, however. =P It's kind of funny, because Mom wants to wear pink to my wedding. She asked my permission. :D I told her it was okay for her to wear pink even though I can't stand the color, and as long as she doesn't make Rob's mom wear pink.

The files that deal with BirdAngel.net are divided into two folders: Public and Site Storage. Public contains the site exactly as it existed a year ago before I cancelled my hosting. Site Storage contains miscellaneous files that I have accrued in making the website: old layouts, many image files, images that were used in making layouts, etc. My Site Storage folder was very unorganized but I finally went through all those files yesterday and got rid of a lot of files I don't need. That should give me a bit more free space on my computer. Now I just need to go through the Public folder. Actually, before I do that, I really should make a layout. But I'm so bad at making layouts. :(

I made a "Coming Soon!" page for BirdAngel.Net and Firefox saddens me, because for once I had to hack up my code to make it work in Firefox as opposed to IE. It looked fine in IE. Sigh. (You won't see the page until the DNS propogates.)

I think I've come to the conclusion that I'm ready to try and bring back Birdangel.net again. I cancelled the hosting over the summer when spammers were attacking it. Since my website was getting so much traffic, my host told me that I was going to have to pay tons more per month because they were going to have to move my website to a dedicated server. I am pretty sure that my weblog was the cause of the spam, since spammers used the comment system to spam 100's of comments every day full of links to their websites.

Two problems then arise if I try to bring back my website. One, the spammers already know about birdangel.net and still have it in their list of websites to spam. So do I get a new domain name? I really don't want to :(. Secondly, the blog on birdangel.net was the main source of the spam, so another way to get rid of the spam would be to get rid of the blog. However, the way I envision my new website, I was kind of thinking of making it an overglorified blog. That is, the main content would be the blog with a few extras on the side. So that doesn't help get rid of the spam either :(.

I'm thinking getting rid of some of the old websites like the Minako website and the Escaflowne website. Although now thinking of it, getting rid of the Minako site makes me a little sad, at least the PGSM stuff =/. I just don't want to have content up that I know I won't update. Having a weblog is easy to update, cause whenever you think of something you want to say, you just post it. Having a full blown website is a bit harder to update, cause you have to fill in content, layouts, site structure, and so on.

Oh... and I'm thinking of possibly making part of the website dedicated to my upcoming wedding. :) That's right I'M ENGAGED! I have a shiny ring too :). Rob is the best ever.

I realize that I haven't posted in about a month. Oops ^^;; You see, this little thing called World of Warcraft took over my life. And I will make a fangirl post about the game eventually. But right now I need to take this opportunity to post because I am leaving for Japan tomorrow morning. Yes, you read that correctly. It's been scheduled since about the beginning of January, but I just haven't mentioned it at all. No reason to not mention it, so I apologize for not mentioning it sooner. So yea, I'll be in Japan for spring break. Leaving tomorrow morning, coming back the Saturday the week after.

Oh, I guess I should explain how it is that I am going to Japan. It's Rob's graduation present from his mom. Frequent flyer miles are the win, cause they're covering most of it. Part of the reason I took up a job, though, is to cover the leftover and my part of the hotel. So I am going with Rob, Rob's mom, and her fiancé. We'll be in Tokyo most of the week though I think we are going to try to go to Nikou at some point.

So see ya later, all. :D

Completely off topic, but does anyone know how to turn off commenting in Wordpress? There doesn't seem to be a nice little option under Options to turn it off for all posts, just to turn it off as the default setting on a post. That doesn't help when all my posts are set to allow comments. I'm getting 500 notifications of blog comments a day and that's gonna kill me to come back from after Japan.

[cloned from A Bird's Melody]

Now that I'm officially all done with this semester, I can start thinking about a new project I've come up with. I decided that I wanted to try and write a gallery in PHP over the span of winter break. This is because I feel very shaky about programming and I need the practice, it's been awhile since I've written something that actually worked, I could use some real PHP experience (especially since I'm trying to get involved with a research project next semester that would require programming in PHP), and it would be nice to actually produce something that works that I didn't produce for a grade. Plus it would just be nice to have a program manage my galleries for me, and then I could add a whole slew of random screenshots and photos to BirdAngel.net. I can also think of at least one friend who would benefit from a web based tool that would manage galleries.

So now I need to come up with a list of program requirements so that I have somewhere to start with this.
* Upload an image
* Upload all images in a directory
* Create a thumbnail for each image
* Classify images into different groups
* Display different groups on different pages
* Change an image's group
* Image in multiple groups?
* Image captions
* Different ways to modify the gallery's look

And obviously I need to expand on this. Which is good, I don't wanna write something that could just be found in some online scripts database. I have some things to consider, like when I upload an image, do I want to upload all images to the same directory, or upload images to a directory that contains all images in a certain category? Also, I want to use MySQL for the gallery that would be on my website, but not all people have MySQL. Would it be possible to modify the code so that it wouldn't need MySQL? And so on and so forth.

If you guys have any suggestions, please throw them my way. I love suggestions.

[cloned from A Bird's Melody]

General fandom merchandise that I own. For your general information and entertainment. Personally, I think it's fun to look at what people own. It gives you a general idea of their tastes.

[cloned from A Bird's Melody]

I put a Kannazuki no Miko image gallery up. That series is so screencappable. Yes, I know the image gallery isn't linked from anywhere else. When I finally get off my butt I'll make an image gallery index and link it from the sidebar and add more galleries. I need to write a gallery in PHP; that'll make things easier. But it takes work to make things easier and at the moment, I'm feeling lazy.

I think this image is my favorite of the bunch.

I need to start working on pages for all the anime I've seen on my anime list. I've been doing pretty well with making sure to write about anime that I've finished recently. I blog it here, then I put it on a page and link it to my anime list later. But I need to take care of the anime I've seen less recently. I might blog it here first, I might not. I haven't decided. Any anime in particular you'd like to hear my thoughts on first? Let me know. Otherwise, I'll probably work either alphabetically or however my muse strikes me. I also need to add screenshots to those pages, but that's a lesser priority.