You'll Hopefully Notice a Few Changes Around Here

The Homepage Actually Has Things to Discover Now

The biggest addition is the new Featured section, with four spots: Anime of the Month, From the Old Web, From the Archive, and Featured Character. Anime of the Month is an old habit coming back, I used to run one on my anime site more than twenty years ago, so apparently some webmaster instincts never die. The artwork for Anime of the Month and Featured Character comes directly out of the archive itself. The images get the crosshatched treatment you see around the site, and hovering over them clears it away so you can see the screencap underneath. The whole thing is wired into the admin now too, so these aren't decorative boxes waiting for me to edit PHP every time I want to change something.

The Sidebar Finally Makes Sense

This one has been bothering me forever. The old sidebar technically had a lot in it, but visually it was one enormous list: navigation, reviews, updates, community stuff, affiliates, login, statistics, all just running together. That's finally been broken into proper sections. Logged out, you'll see Join the Archive at the top. Logged in, that becomes Your Archive, with your avatar, profile, private messages, followed updates, new activity, and account controls. There's also a proper little Site section now with Homepage, Contact Us, Disclaimer, and Affiliate With Us. I spent enough years building anime sites in the old web era that I'm apparently incapable of making a website without those links being easy to find.

The Archive Is a Little Easier to Understand at a Glance

There's an Archive Statistics section now too. As of today the Gallery sits at over 309,000 images, and that number keeps moving. More importantly, we now track complete screencap collections, and there are currently 17 series with full episodic coverage, including Naruto, Naruto: Shippuden, Dragon Ball Z, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop, Fullmetal Alchemist, Initial D, FLCL, Tenchi Muyo!, and a pile of others. That number matters more to me than just stating how many images are in the database, because there's a big difference between having thousands of random screenshots and being able to open a series and move episode by episode through the entire thing. That's what the Gallery has slowly turned into.

News Posts Are Posts Again

This might be the less obvious change until you actually scroll down. The homepage used to squash every news post into the same tiny excerpt, so a short update looked like a long article and a long article looked like a short update. Headings disappeared, lists disappeared, formatting disappeared, and everything became a few lines followed by Read More. That's gone. Homepage news previews now preserve the actual structure of the post, paragraphs stay paragraphs, headings show up, lists show up, links and emphasis survive. Some posts are therefore much taller than others now, and good, that's how posts work. The old anime web didn't arrange every thought into identical little content cards, and I'm not interested in doing that either.

Mostly, It Feels Like a Website Again

There are smaller changes mixed into all of this too. Profile images in news posts are smaller, borders have more purpose, sections are actually sections, and the colours have been pulled back so the site isn't trying to turn every box into another piece of the pastel header. None of this is a radical redesign. The banner is still the banner, the colours are still AnimeHistory, and the archive underneath hasn't changed. What changed is that the homepage finally feels a little less like a front end strapped onto a database and a little more like an anime site somebody actually built. Which, considering where all of this started, feels about right.

Tomorrow I can go back to adding Lore. Probably. 😛