NEW TEMPLATE, NEW LOOK.
Bye-bye "Sanddollar", hello "Snapshot Sable"."Sanddollar" looked great when I started using it in the summer of 2003, replacing whatever default template it was that was this blog's original template, but that was almost four years ago and now it was getting to look, if not outright decrepit and dated, certainly a little long in the tooth.
The blog has evolved over the past year into something a lot more visually-oriented, with half my posts being essentially picture diaries cum travelogues, and "Sanddollar" just seems better suited for dense text than it does photos. Lately, I've just been feeling as though I've been doing the digital equivalent of sticking snapshots into a paperback novel.
What really frosted me is that fewer and fewer of the pictures I've been posting have been showing up in Google Image Search, and Google Image Search's latest update, which has gone online this week, has forgotten most of the remaining pictures that I had left in the index. I'm convinced that something in one of the many alterations that I had done to the "Sanddollar" template on my blog has been repelling Google Image Search spiders, so I've decided to start afresh with a blank slate template.
One of the changes I'm making is that I am retiring the old link list, and it'll be a while before I'll post a new one, excluding links to other places I am on the Internet. It had become really bloated, and, while I still look at plenty of the listed sites, some of the sites were relevant to me three or four years ago but aren't so much anymore, especially now that I'm in a different city. Not that that is in many way meant to be a disparagement of anyone's site. Plus, I think at least a dozen of those sites are either gone or have changed URL's.
For now, I'll just have a link to the old links, which I will put at the bottom of this post.
Another change I'm making is that I'm retiring the PicoSearch search box. It served me well for a few years, but it was cumbersome for me to have to update the index manually, and, over the past few months, it has become redundant as the "Search" function at the top of the screen has gone from using Google, which is unreliable in terms of what it does and doesn't find, to being an internal Blogger search, which has a complete index of everything I've written here since 2003 and which displays the whole post. For my purposes now, Blogger's internal search engine is better in every way that PicoSearch.
And, with PicoSearch gone, you may be pleased to know that, for the first time in four years, I have enabled "Comments" in this blog. PicoSearch is what was keeping me from doing this before, for a complicated reason. See, when you have "Comments" enabled in Blogger, you get a separate page for each entry. The problem with PicoSearch for those of us free-loaders is that free memberships are limited to indexing 2000 pages, which I'd pass relatively quickly if I'd enable comments, while, if I don't enable comments, I can go for about 20 more years. But, if I stop using Picosearch, the 2000 page limit is no longer a problem.
I'll probably put a title graphic at the top of the page, but that requires actual work, so it will be a while.
CANADIAN BLOGS
Colby Cosh
Andrew Coyne
All AgitProp, All the Time Paul Jané
DAIMNATION! Damian Penny
Segacs's World I Know Sari Stein
Adam Yoshida
AMERICAN BLOGS
COINTELPRO Tool- Manufacturing Consent Since 2002
G-Files (Jonah Goldberg fans)
Insta Pundit Glenn Reynolds
Little Green Footballs Blog
Miserable Failure (no, it's about Hillary Clinton...)
BORDER-HOPPER BLOGS
Being American in T.O. Debbye Stratigacos
David Frum's Diary @ National Review Online
COLUMNISTS, PUNDITS,
RADIO/TV HOSTS & OTHERS
Ann Coulter
Al Franken (real site)
Al Franken #2, LyingLiar.com
Al Franken #3, Frankenlies.com
David Frum (official site)
Sean Hannity
George Jonas
Rush Limbaugh
Michael Moore (real site)
Michael Moore #2 Moorewatch.com
Michael Moore #3 Bowling for Truth
Mark Steyn
POLITICAL
The Center for Consumer Freedom (Anti-Nanny State, anti-anti-Smoking Gestapo, & anti-Nutrition Gestapo)
Free Republic
Justice for Daniel Faulkner, the truth about cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal
National Review Online
Standing Tall, Justin Berzon's restored Twin Towers proposal
Team Twin Towers, for those of us in favour of restoring the majesty of the Twin Towers to the Manhattan Skyline.
CARTOONS (& COMICS)
JAPANESE, AMERICAN,
CANADIAN, & OTHERWISE
Anime Jump (Mike Toole & others)
AnimeNation
AnimeNation's "Ask John" column by John Oppliger
AnimeNation Forum (where I'm Kiyone)
AnimeNation Links
Anime News Network
Anime News Network Forum where I'm Tenchi
Anime News Network My "My Anime" list
Anime On DVD
Anime News Service
The Big Cartoon Database
Doctor Snuggles (official site)
Furinkan.com, about the works of Ms. Rumiko Takahashi (Urusei Yatsura, Ranma ½, Maison Ikkoku, & Inu Yasha)
Jingoro.org, about Izumi Matsumoto's Kimagure Orange Road manga
Kevin Spencer (official site)
King of the Hill (official FOX site)
King of the Hill Information Site
Kiyone, the teal-haired goddess (from Tenchi Muyo)
the Miyazaki Mailing List @ Nausicaa.net
Mouse Planet (about Disney)
Natsume Maya (Anime News straight from Japan)
Nausicaa.net about the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli
South Park Scriptorium, scripts, episode guides, and much more!
South Park Studios, the official South Park site.
Tomobiki-cho, the Urusei Yatsura Web Site @ Furinkan.com
Untalkative Bunny Club @ Yahoo (semi-official)
Untalkative Bunny fanlisting (offical)
The World of Urusei Yatsura's Lum
Alex Weitzman's "The Animated World" @ bcdb.com
Zannen, Canada, Jesse Betteridge's page bemoaning the lack of anime on Canadian TV.
OTHER CARTOON LOVERS
(Yes, Anime = Cartoons)
"We love cartoons, we love all the action.
We love cartoons, how they dance and sing.
We love cartoons, they're the main attraction.
Cartoon heroes can do anything." (Muppet Babies)
"Arxane"
"UberDirector"'s UberDirectory
Amanda Wells ("Incisivis")
MOVIES, TV
& STUFF
CHUD - Cinematic Happenings Under Development
Roger Ebert
The Internet Movie Database
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes Forum where I'm Kiyone
My Rotten Tomatoes Journal
OTHER STUFF
Stuff? Were the midterms hard?
Fandom Wank, Mainly LiveJournal-oriented, but there's plenty of Anime Fandom mockery
F*ckin' Otaku- anti-fanboy
Homestar Runner- Cartoons, games, and stuff.
Jagged*Team Games, Anime & stuff
Maddox: The Best Page in the Universe (besides X-Entertainment, duh)
Something Awful, home of the "Weekend Web" column, as well as spoofs, Photoshop gags, and sarcastic reviews about all sorts of things, including Hentai games.
Strong Bad's E-mails
X-Entertainment Matt Caracappa (nostalgia page mainly for those of us who went through grade school in the 1980s)
Anime News Network where I'm Tenchi in the forum. Also check out my anime list.
Linked on Blog
Search Engine,
BlogWise, BlogHop,
Blogging
Ecosystem, YUL
Blog (Montreal
area bloggers),
BlogStreet
Technorati Profile
posted by Steve Brandon @ 7:15 PM
4 Comments:
Thought you might like this, if you haven't seen it already:
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1825622556
I like the model British town... that looks like a lot of work went into it.
I was going to say that it must have been tough to get motion blur on the wheels in stop-motion, but I think I figured it out: while some of it is obviously stop-motion, sometimes it's not stop-motion and the camera is attached directly to the car while an off-frame hand guides the motuon.
you haven't posted in a while. what's the deal?
Yeah, sorry. I've been posting at Flickr a lot, which subtracts from my blogging time.
Also, I finally got my Super Gals season 2 boxset, which I'm in the middle of watching.
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