Cruel Angel Theses

Here are some spoilers: Your blog dies in WordPress 2.3. Or at the very least goes into sudden cardiac arrest, requiring a mouth-to-mouth and a frantic trip to the ER for that quadruple-bypass you’ve been putting off. You might even need to shut down for a couple of days while it lies comatose, like I unwittingly had the foresight to do while upgrading.

Let me tell you, however, that the upgrade, amidst all that blood, sweat, tears, and missing out on reading (and writing) Autumn posts was worth it. I have seen the future of anime blogging, and it is Tags. Spelled with a capital letter. Tags. With bold. Tags. You get the idea. While this might seem like a small matter to some of you who have been using categories for your anime series for ages, the benefits of using Tags were immediately obvious to me.

what goes through my mind everytime I see Gensokyoans(sp) using computers isn’t “oh, they’re using them”, but “why do they suck so much”, since their scope of powers are so hax, you’d think they’d be able to get better rigs

Back to what I said about your blog dying earlier. In layman’s terms, with the exception of some well-maintained, still-supported-by-their-creator themes, a lot of themes die because there were some drastic database/table changes made to the WordPress system, and when your now-defunct theme tries to request something that no longer exists, it goes bankai on you, for lack of a better term.

This is really what the codex glosses over while listing out all the shiny new things you can do with 2.3. I’ll have to admit that the plugins update alert is great, if only because I used some 25-odd plugins back on 2.2.2 and could never be arsed to check for updates given the quantity, and generally impractical method of doing so.

The upgrade process wasn’t as smooth or seamless as I’d have hoped for, though. Just when Randall got my message and began the upgrade, Dreamhost decided that I wasn’t worthy of the new version, and began giving me, along with everyone else on ikimashou.net, the finger by unceremoniously increasing page load times to an average of 300-500 seconds. That’s right, on the first night of my upgrade I waited 10 minutes for a page to load in my dashboard.

A few harrowing hours later, Dreamhost decided that it had enough with antagonizing a bunch of motley bloggers, and decided to do something else. Load times almost returned to normal levels, and by normal levels I mean waiting an average of 15-20 seconds for a dashboard page to load. I then decided that the next best thing to do would be to deactivate all my plugins, and proceeded to watch my blog spit out a fatal error.

Definitely not a good sign of things to come, but I wasn’t expecting things to worsen at that point. Apparently the Optimal Title plugin I was using made the blog dependent on it thanks to this piece of code you had to add to the header in tandem, so much so that it killed the blog if it wasn’t turned on. I continued activating plugins, having upgraded the now-obsolete ones beforehand. Everything seemed fine.

Then I looked at the sidebar. Where my blogroll used to be there was now a small window with code in it saying “WordPress database error: [Table 'wordpress.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]“, which is the last thing you should want to see if you’re upgrading and use a theme that’s particularly precious to you. In my panic I frantically searched the WordPress Codex forums, conveniently ignoring this sticky, and came to the disappointing conclusion 10 or so topics later that I’d have to abandon freshy2.

To cut a long story short, after staying up till the wee hours of the morning while whining on IRC and much browsing through the list of 2.3 compatible themes, I settled on mandigo, which I wholly recommend to anyone who likes customization. Aside from the built-in image header rotator, it also had title customization, making for a total of two plugins saved.

Which brings me to the main selling point of 2.3 — Tags. Deceptively simple, but it opens up a wealth of possibilities unheard off before, especially with regards to anime blogging. After comparing tag organization plugins for a moment I decided to go with Simple Tags. More on that later.

The main reason why I think tags are the way to go for anime blogging is simple: it lends for ease of user navigation, which, in my opinion, is something no self-respecting blogger should overlook, since your audience is someone you should be taking care of. After being spoilt on themes that allow you to jump to the next post in chronological order without going back to the index, essential widgets like Recent Comments/Recent posts, and the often-overlooked full RSS feed, I find a lot of blogs to be annoyingly difficult to navigate.

How do tags figure into all this, you ask? Quite simple, really. While it would have been impractical with the old version using categories, the reason why I like tags is due to no other than the infinite flexibility with which it allows you to go about things. Even more so when you figure out how well the excellent and timely WP 2.3 Related Posts plugin goes along with it.

What I disliked about the previous Related Posts plugin that I used was how it was tedious and complicated. If my programmer friend hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have realised that I had to actually insert a bit of code (the specific sentence was “Recent Posts is called…”, which meant nothing to me since I thought it was referring to “called” in the ordinary sense of the word) in order to get it working, and modify several variables at that.

WP 2.3 Related Posts saves you all that by telling you exactly what bit of code to insert, and where, and how. More importantly, it leverages on the power of tags by actually making the related posts relevant, instead of merely relying on keywords in the post to gauge its reliability. What this means is that not only will you have more traffic on your blog, but also allow your audience to read posts of similar content that they might have missed out on.

In practice, this is how it would work:

1. I tag my Lucky Star review post with the “comedy”, “high school”, and “slice of life” tags.
2. Since they share the same genres, I also proceed to label Azumanga Daioh and Manabi Straight! with the same tags.
3. When a first-time visitor arrives on my blog, he or she is more likely to stay and read longer due to there being posts of actual relevance.
4. If the reader’s interested in a particular anime and would like know about other anime in the same vein, I’ve just managed to get him or her to stay longer, and perhaps subscribe and become a regular reader.
5. The end result is a more productive blog which generates more traffic and/or subscribers.

It goes without saying that tagging by genre helps immensely, whether or not you choose to use the WP 2.3 Related Posts plugin. Even by itself, tagging by genre is a powerful tool, as it sorts your posts more neatly and makes them more accessible. As our primary blog focus is on content that can be easily defined along those lines, embracing this new aspect of 2.3 would be the next obvious step to take.

Referring to what I said earlier, Simple Tags does things in an uncomplicated yet intuitive manner, which is why it I recommend it for all your tagging needs. Tagging the 69 posts I’ve made so far took up no more than half an hour, maybe less — as you can see from the link, its Mass Tagging feature lends for ease of tagging untagged posts. Adding a tag is quick, painless, and as easy as adding one to a picture on danbooru, or any *booru clone, since an auto-complete menu pops up while you type in a tag name.

To digress a little here, one fun thing you can do with tags is to make up your own labels. While common sense requires that you tag your posts with the commonly-used tags such as “shounen”, “shoujo”, “mecha”, “harem” and whatnot, it doesn’t take a far stretch of the imagination to create tags such as “GAR”, “I was embarrassed to watch this in front of my family”, “I saw this only for the hot girls”, and so on.

Now that that’s out of the way, it feels great to be back. I ditched Spam Karma 2 in favour of reCAPTCHA since I’m really tired of checking my Spam summary e-mails everyday, there is still the occasional false positive, and I figured that making those who wanted to comment here type an extra word or two wouldn’t hurt (thanks Moogy for the idea).

Much thanks goes out too to mellow_bunny and Ori0n for assisting me during those dark hours of trying to fix LMB^Box Comment Quicktags and general CSS problems respectively. I don’t know where my blog would be without the help of programmers, since there are times where high proficiency is required, something I definitely don’t have.

Martin, I hope this post helped you look at 2.3 in a better light. I have now eight unwatched episodes to catch up on, aside from God knows how many excellent blog posts my fellow bloggers have written over the past few weeks. Man, you people sure can write.. although it’s not like I’m complaining or anything. Expect more posts over the next few days, including this movie review that I’ve delayed no end, much to my chagrin.