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Say Hello To AnimeNano.com!

AnimeNano.jpg

So I’ve been keeping myself pretty busy this Summer. ‘Doing what?,’ you ask? Rolling my own blog feed aggregator and forums, that’s what! Yep, Anime Nano is yet another blog feed aggregator for, you guessed it, anime.

Now, I have nothing against either Animeblogger.net antenna or Blogsuki. To me, they’re on two weird polar extremes. Animeblogger.net Antenna has a lot of blogs. Like, 100! There’s a lot of good blogs on there, but not all of them interest me. On the other hand, Blogsuki has less blogs, and a lot of good ones were kicked off. I really like Blogsuki, but I think I should be able to choose which blogs I want to read. That’s where Anime Nano comes in.

With Anime Nano, you can check out the anime blog directory (right now it’s only me…) and “subscribe” to any number of blogs. You can go to “MyNano” (yeah, original, I know), and your filtered feeds will appear there. You can also pick up an RSS feed of either all of the blogs, or your personal selection.

Anime Nano has a bunch of other stuff that you can do too. Registration is technically optional, but you’ll have to in order to create your subscription list and participate in the forums. You can also personalize your profile (no, Anime Nano is not going to turn into a myspace clone!) and I’ll be adding more features as well.

The forums are a little rugged right now. I made them in a few hours today. I assure you they’ll be cooler in the future. I hope.

Right now I’m accepting new blog applications (otherwise Anime Nano would be pretty dull right?). The rules for getting in are pretty much the same as Blogsuki, I guess, but I want to get a large number of blogs in the directory. I’m kind of afraid right now that my shared hosting will kill me from the CPU power it takes to parse all the feeds, but I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. To apply, just register and head to the User CP panel where you can submit your blog for approval.

For those of you who are interested in the technical aspects of Anime Nano, I wrote the thing on Ruby on Rails in about three weeks. During that time, I first had to learn Rails, and then code it. It wasn’t that bad, really. It offers a really nice way to think of web applications in an object oriented way. I have a feeling that doing this in PHP and MYSQL queries would have taken me quite a bit longer.

I also designed everything on Anime Nano. The Header graphic, the layout, the CSS. It’s all my fault. Or rather, I did it all (if you think it actually looks good!). I’ll try to pretty it up a little more as I have time.

Oh, and about the name, I wanted something that had more than one meaning. Well, Nano in itself means small, right? It also seems cool because of the iPod Nano and whatnot. The other meaning is in Japanese. Y’know, Anime, na no! It’s anime! Hopefully that’s what it really means (I’m always questioning my bad Japanese skills, y’know).

I guess that’s enough of an explanation. For now, head over to AnimeNano.com and let me know if you like it. Or if you think it’s dumb and done before. I’m happy to hear any suggestions or anything. Either comment here, or in the AnimeNano Forums! Since I rolled this thing on my own, there’s bound to be mistakes and bugs lying around.

29 replies on “Say Hello To AnimeNano.com!”

Hmm. I think I registered … but my profile and picture won’t appear. 😉 Here’s to hoping you got my registration.

My blog’s only 3 months old though. Gosh, I hope that’s old enough.

Another RSS!

While I’m very happy about this new “toy”, I can’t help but feel the number are starting to crunch. Sure everyone wants to be a part of an aggregator to get hits, but how many people really look through all of them. I myself go to blogsuki on a daily basis now, while ABA probably once a week.

Though I might like the extra features, some of them seem kinda gimmicky. All in all, hope it gets some success because I already registered XD! btw, Spiffy Header

@Kitty: Yikes! I fixed that little bug. At least, now I can see your user pic. As for the profile, did you go into the user control panel and input some info? There won’t be any info unless you do that. I didn’t want to put people’s emails in the open or anything.

@kozu: Yeah, the problem I have with ABT is the sheer number too. I also go to BS everyday. With AnimeNano you get to choose which blogs you want to read. So it’s a way to make sure you’re not missing out on anything good. I designed AnimeNano to be something I’d wanna use myself, so hopefully other people will wanna use it too…

Thanks for your comments!

Okay, I managed to sign up. At the moment, I really love this idea. Blogsuki was indeed flawed because most of the better blogs (along with my own) were deleted from it. Animeblogger had the problem of having too many blogs. This will be a great alternative. ^_^

*goes to find some good avatar for him to use*

Hello, AnimeNano!

Ok, I also applied 🙂

I’d suggerst however that you add a “remember me” option along with the login, because there are those like me who are too lazy to log in every time they visit AnimeNano.

Very nice…kind of like a My Yahoo for anime blogs, I like it so far. It’d be nice if you could give it the option of a more “compact” listing like BlogSuki with a single line per blog entry, but that’s just my preference. But I like the concept, I like having the ability to control which blogs do and don’t show up in the list–keep up the good work!

Hey everyone,
Thanks for all the comments! I’ve been busy fixing even more stuff. It seems that the description length limit for blogs was set to 255 characters. So your description might have been cut off. Sorry about that! I fixed that so it’s 65535 or something big like that. I’m going through all the submitted blogs right now.

As for the requested features, I’ll be attempting those shortly.

My display pic doesn’t show though. Even after I used jpmeyer’s advice on redoing it after my blog got approved.

But otherwise, I’m still amazed at the ability to customise. Truly, that just bloody solves a lot of problems.

Hmmm. To be quite honest, I didn’t do too much testing on that image part. I ran a few jpegs through, and it seemed to work okay.

Do note that users and blogs have their own pictures. So your personal picture could be a unicorn, and your blog could have a picture of a giraffe. I can see that you (tj han) added a eureka seven (I think) picture to your profile. Did you mean to make this your blog picture? That’s probably the issue you’re having.

2 things, 1)please work it somehow so that it’ll let me register as Os, because i need at least 3 letters in my username like many other message boards and 2)I wanna choose our icon before someone else does, how do I show you that.

Os:
1) Done.
2) Once you’ve registered, I’ll add you on as a writer for Kono Sono. Kozu already signed your blog up. You’ll both have access to editing the description and icons. I have to do this by hand, though, until I get a group anime blog management thing going (if I ever do, I mean, there’s only so many group anime blogs, right?). No one can choose your icon but the actual writers of your blog, so don’t worry!

Well done! The subscribing options are great, and I love the userpic, which I’m having no trouble with.

One comment, though, is that displaying the subscriber numbers seems a double-edged sword – while it is useful, it may create a sense of unhealthy competition.

@hopeless
I thought about the subscriber thing too. Maybe have it as an option for people to choose if they want their blog to have public stats? If enough people ask for it, I’ll try implementing that.

Ah, thanks Hung. Usually when I cant register as Os, I end up with kkunurashima, which I dont mind, but seeing as when I write under the name Os… and when I said I wanted to change the icon before “other people”… I meant before Kozu could choose. ha ha. Anywho, thanks for letting me register as so.

Hung, the system is great, though I have a few suggestions too.

– It would be cool if we could subscribe to blogs via posts on the main page.
– Also, the blog directory is kind of in a random order, perhaps sorting it by blog name would make it easier to find what you’re looking for?
– Lastly, the specific series pages are in a kind of random order too.

Just little things really. Keep up the great work!

@bateszi

It looks like the directory is in order by date added, which is convienent if you’re checking to see if new blogs have been added but yeah, I do agree that it also makes the whole layout seem kinda random if you are trying to look for a specific blog to subscribe to. Perhaps have ways to sort them? I’m no coder so I don’t know what sort of effort that would entail.

Well, as someone who came into this thing late and has been denied blogsuki membership, I endorse this project 100%.

However, you lack a banner icon, so I resized your banner and made it myself…hope this is ok

Ix

So a few more things:
@batezi
I can add a subscription button to the individual entries. Shouldn’t take too much time. Also, yeah, the blog directory is sorted by join date right now. I’ll try to make it alphabetical, or maybe something truly random (so everyone can have a chance to be seen?) Ordering the specific series pages won’t be too hard either.

@Ixthedamned
Hey, that’s cool. I was going to get around to making one (I’ve been pretty busy if you couldn’t tell), but yours looks good. I’ll be adding a few more info pages too, since the site isn’t totally self-explanatory.

Thanks again everyone for your comments!

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