Just a reminder that our donation drive is still ongoing since we haven’t reached our minimum goal yet.  As of the time I write this, we have $994.57 and need at least $1600, this will cover hosting at our current levels through the end of June.  If we get another $600 in donations on top of that (for a total of $2200) we’ll add an additional server as well.

For more detailed info on the donation drive please see my original post and if you’d like to donate please go to our donations page.

Donation Meter Plugin

We have a donation meter plugin that’ll let you add the donation meter to your sidebar and have it update automatically.  If you’d like to add this to your blog just save the plugin file and change the extension from .txt to .php.  Now upload this file to your wp-content/plugins directory.  Then you activate it and add the following code to your sidebar wherever you want it to appear:

< ? php dd_display(170); ?>

The number specifies how many pixels wide the donation meter should be, so change the 170 to something slightly less than your sidebar’s width.  The plugin outputs all the necessary code, with the header being an <h2> and the meter itself enclosed in <ul> tags.  (We chose these because they’re the most common.)  If you need to change these you’ll need to edit the plugin code to do so, but it’s really straightforward.  There’s also a set of sayings that the plugin will randomly put below the donation meter itself, here’s the default ones:

$sayings[] = 'Just a bit more guys!';
$sayings[] = 'It can\'t hurt to help!';
$sayings[] = 'Be a pal, a PayPal!';
$sayings[] = 'We need money. Badly. ';
$sayings[] = 'Keep us in business.';
$sayings[] = 'Feel good; lend a hand.';


Feel free to change these or add new ones if you’d like.   (Note: single quote marks in the text will need to have a \ in front of them.)

Demographics Survey

And finally, if you haven’t taken our demographics survey yet, please do, it’ll help us out as we work on selling ads directly.  For full information on the survey check out my post on it.  This is something everyone can do since it only takes a minute or two of your time and doesn’t cost anything.

AnimeBlogger.net has always been supportive of new writers all over the world to establish their blog for free. As we continue to expand and include new bloggers to the anime blogosphere, we have reached a point where advertising dollars are not enough to pay for the hosting services.

Hence, we have decided to appeal for donations to cover the taxes and hosting fees of AnimeBlogger.net. The first goal is to raise US$1600 to cover three months of hosting and the taxes applicable to AnimeBlogger.net. When we have secured that amount, we are looking into adding another server in order to accommodate more writers, which is where the second goal comes in.  If we reach our second goal of US$2200, we’ll be able to add another server.

If you are wondering how you can donate to us, there are various ways. First, you can directly donate to the site via Amazon or Paypal from our donations page. Second, you can buy AnimeBlogger.net merchandise.  As an incentive to those who donate, everyone who donates more than $5 will be entered to win a prize. Currently we have a sponsor that’s paying for two AnimeBlogger.net shirts for winners. You can also contribute any anime-related items as prizes for the lucky draw.

AnimeBlogger.net needs your help. Everyone is integral to the support of AnimeBlogger.net. Every little bit counts to hit our target, be it $1 or $100. You will make a difference. Thank you and please continue to explore our anime blogging community!

Donation Meter Plugin

We encourage you to let others know about AB’s donation drive, and to help with that we have a Wordpress plugin available that you can use to put a donation meter on your sidebar.  The donation meter shows the the current donation amount in green, a bar extends out to the first goal in red, then the second goal’s in yellow.  The plugin pulls its data from our servers so it’ll update itself as we get donations in.

To install the plugin on your blog, first download the plugin.  (You can also view the source of the plugin.)  Next extract the file from the zip archive and upload that file to your wp-content/plugins directory.  Then you activate the plugin and add the following code to your sidebar wherever you want it to appear:

< ?php dd_display(170); ?>

The number specifies how many pixels wide the donation meter should be, so change the 170 to something slightly less than your sidebar’s width.  The plugin outputs all the necessary code, with the header being an <h2> and the meter itself enclosed in <ul> tags.  (We chose these because they’re the most common.)  If you need to change these you’ll need to edit the plugin code to do so, but it’s really straightforward.  Finally, there’s a set of sayings that the plugin will randomly put below the donation meter itself, here’s the default ones:

$sayings[] = 'Just a bit more guys!';
$sayings[] = 'It can\'t hurt to help!';
$sayings[] = 'Be a pal, a PayPal!';
$sayings[] = 'We need money. Badly. ';
$sayings[] = 'Keep us in business.';
$sayings[] = 'Feel good; lend a hand.';


Feel free to change these or add new ones if you’d like.   (Note: single quote marks in the text will need to have a \ in front of them.)

Secondly, one of our dedicated servers will be down for some electrical maintenance, the transformer that supplies power to the hosting company has to be taken offline for 3 to 5 hours to repair a “high voltage elbow“.  This is semi-emergency maintenance, there was a fire in a nearby building recently, and upon inspecting all the transformers in the area the electric company found several needing repairs.  Work is scheduled to begin around 08:00 CST (13:00 GMT) and will take anywhere from 3 to 5 hours, hopefully more towards the lower end.  This outage will affect the blogs on that dedicated server (which are most of the bigger blogs besides Random Curiosity), the main site and my blog.

We apologize for the inconvenience!

This is just a quick note to let everyone who’s waiting on an account know what’s going on.  Last month we first had server problems which were caused by our combined sites using too much CPU time and crashing the server.  I finally got that fixed (mainly by moving some people off to another server) and then my health took a turn for the worse and I spent about two weeks unable to spend much time on the computer at all.  Needless to say this has got new account creation way behind.

There’s still a bit of a problem with CPU load on the server, adding too many new accounts at once would not be a good idea.  The good news is I think we’ll be able to upgrade our hosting shortly so this will cease to be an issue, in the meantime I’ll be going ahead and creating accounts for everyone who’s already received a reply to their hosting request (you’ll know if you received it, it asks you for the sitename and what type of E-mail account you want if any).  I’ll be sending this reply out to the rest of the pending requests soon, but there will be a delay before I can start actually creating those accounts.

If you know someone who’s waiting for an account that might not read my blog, please let them know about this post.  Thanks!

This is probably the most asked question about AnimeBlogger.net, and it’s largely because we’ve never really advertised the fact that we offer free hosting for anime/manga blogs.  When I first started the site Matthew did mention the free hosting in a post on his blog, but that’s it, until now at least.   In a lot of ways it’s the worst kept secret in the anime/manga blogging community because it has been mentioned on our Forums several times, for example in this thread.  When anime/manga bloggers report needing new hosting you’ll often see people recommend they talk to me, for example this entry at Hige vs Otaku.  I’ll also respond to such posts and offer hosting if I see them, but I don’t always see them before the hosting situation has been resolved.  So how do you get a blog with AnimeBlogger.net?

Currently the only way to get a blog with AnimeBlogger.net is to E-mail me and ask for one.  (Note: you will need to remove the obviously extra text from the address before you can send.)  Most people who ask me for hosting have found out that we offer it by the forum route, although there are also a few referred to me by someone we already host and a few I contacted that had posted about needing new hosting.  For now this will continue to be the only way to get a blog for a variety of reasons I’ll get into in a moment.

The next question would be who can get a blog with AnimeBlogger.net?  The answer is anyone as long as your blog is mainly about anime, manga or other subjects that are primarily associated with anime/manga fandom.  (Jpop, Japanese or Otaku culture, etc.)  We don’t have any rules on being an established blogger already (most of the people we host weren’t) although we are quite happy to setup accounts for established bloggers who want to move.  Basically if you’re interested in an AnimeBlogger.net blog you’re probably going to pass the content test (you’re going to want to blog on anime/manga/etc. anyway) and we’ll be glad to setup an account for you.  (Do note that we don’t have a problem if you also post about things other than anime/manga/etc., like things going on in your life, as long as your blog is mainly about anime/manga/etc.)

One thing many people may not expect is that the process of setting up the blog on our end takes at least a few days.  If we’ve had a lot of requests recently, or are busy with work/school/etc. it can take longer.  Most of the process is done manually, combining a web-based control panel provided by my hosting provider and from the command line on the server itself.  A large part of the delay is waiting for the updates to DNS (Domain Name Service) to propagate out through the Internet (this can take up to 48 hours) as there are two subdomains created for every blog (the actual blog’s subdomain and one for the blog’s database, both are unique to each blog).  Another part of the delay is waiting for the log rotation on the server to get established so that we can add the blog to our custom log backup routine.  (This is important for when we get all accounts setup with extended stats.  Because we can’t run the extended stats creation process on the shared web server, it has to be run off a Linux server located at my home.  This server is not powerful enough to process all the logs for every account daily and needs to be replaced with a newer machine.  I’ll discuss this in more detail in a future post.)

For those that we host, we do have Terms of Service that each user must agree to.  Currently users are not allowed to post pornography; are required to provide links to the main site, the forums and the Antenna; are not allowed to run ads or put affiliate links on their account without permission (with the exception of ads for registered charities); and of course are not allowed to use their account for any illegal purposes.  Those are just the main highlights, all users are expected to know, and comply with, the full document.  In the near future we’ll be modifying our Terms of Service slightly, one of the key changes will be to make the donations link a required link.  Most of the other changes will be to clarify existing sections (for example what do we mean by “an evident link”).

So why don’t we more widely advertise that free hosting is available?  Well at first we didn’t because we wanted to get an automated process setup to create the accounts.  Eventually it became obvious that fully automating this process isn’t possible as some things must be done from the web panel manually.  It’s also become painfully obvious that any kind of link setup for creating accounts would get spammed horribly.  (See my post about dealing with spam for an idea of the spam we deal with already.)  Finally though, I think the process we have now is better in some ways.  How many sites that you sign up with do you get to talk to the owner?  Our users are used to contacting me personally when they have a problem, whether by E-mail, on the forums or on our IRC channel (for the record E-mail’s the best way to contact me).

There actually is one last factor in why we haven’t widely advertised our free hosting, and that is that we have a limit on the number of accounts we can add with our current hosting plan.  While we’re in no danger of hitting that threshold yet, we’re roughly 30% of the way to it.  Once we reach that threshold we will likely have to move to dedicated hosting before we can start adding new accounts.  Dedicated hosting will be considerably more expensive than our current hosting plan, and while it’s something we see moving to in the future, right now we can’t afford it.  Even with our current modest hosting costs, the site doesn’t manage to pay for itself through donations and affiliate sales.  I’ll be talking about this in more detail in a future post, so I’ll leave it at that for now, except to say we greatly appreciate all the donations everyone make, and all purchases made through our affiliate links.

So now you know how to get a blog on AnimeBlogger.net.  Feel free to share this info with others, and to direct them either to E-mail me or to this post.  (Note: you will need to remove the obviously extra text from the address before you can send.)  If we get near our threshold of users and have to stop giving out accounts I’ll post to let everyone know this is the case as well as add an update to this post.  For those interested in hosting you might want to read through our Terms of Service.  Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about them, some of the language can be difficult to understand because it’s a legal document.  I can provide clarification on anything you’re unsure of and do so in plain English instead of legalese.