Well, if you’re here anytime around September of 2006, then you probably know what’s going on, and what this is. For the sake of those who don’t, I’ll summarize. At the beginning of 2004, I, set out to create a site about politics and such. Originally, it was intended to focus somewhat on the national/internatinal scene, but mostly on local matters pertaining to my adopted home town of Houston, Texas. Thus I named it “Houblog.” Catchy, ain’t it? Whoopee.
I chose to write under a pseudonym, because my posts often were not friendly to the local government officials. At first I used the open-source PostNuke for my blogging, as a friend had introduced me to it. However, it was a piece of junk and hard to use; I kept waiting on the promised version 8.0 which would “fix” all the problems, but nothing was happening. (I finally found out that the primary developer had died in an accident.) It was sort of like being in my on world; I couldn’t do trackbacks or have a proper blogroll, so I wasn’t really a member of the net community. I was just….there. About a year ago, I stopped pretending that I was writing into the void, upgraded to WordPress, and started actually having a dialogue with other bloggers.
However, the more serious I got about blogging local affairs through this summer, the more I also began to blog about Japanese animation as a way to relax. It got to the point that my readership was 40% local politics and 60% animé, and the more complicated and stressful work and life got, the more I blogged about non-political matters. Since I had certain committments I felt I had to keep on the political side (I was, by this time, also a contributor on a group news/commentary blog), I started getting way overloaded and further stressed, which led to more and more animé blogging on what was supposed to be a political site. Which in turn stressed me more, because I felt like I was letting down readers who were there for the politics.
That just wasn’t going to do. If things kept on the way they were, I was going to end up doing a DenBeste and retire to full-time anime-blogging. Reaching my limits shortly after Labor Day, I sastisfied my committments by chunking all of them. In short, I took a hiatus from all my blogging in order to take care of some other issues, and relax a bit. I’ve now commence splitting the anime from Houblog into a separate site. This one, obviously. Eventually, I hope to delete all the anime posts from over there and move them here, although it’s going to be a cast-iron bitch to do it; I expect to lose all the comments and since I’m going to rationalize the screencap directories, not only will I have to move hundreds of .jpgs over here, I expect to have to rewrite every single img src tag in about 50 posts.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I am insane. This is simplifying my life? Color me anal retentive. Well, anyway, after a few adventures, I’ve got the bare minimums set up, and this is now the actual first post at the new site. But what is this site called? Well, therein lies a tale…
The following post first appeared on 9/25/06 over at Houblog.
Just keeping everyone posted on the state of affairs. I did not get as much done yet as I’d hoped, largely because of Magic the Gathering Addiction. This was the weekend of the Time Spiral Pre-release, so I spent Saturday and Sunday (after doing a few things around the house) shopping and playing. I only bought a few packs of cards because I’m pretty tight right now (more about that later). Most of the money went for entry fees into two tourneys. I was late both days and that’s all I could get into. I went 2-2-drop in the sixth flight (sealed deck) on the first day, and then eliminated in the first round of a booster draft on the second day. (For the uninitiated, the contest was to open packs of random cards and assemble winning decks from them.) This performanceis about what I expected–maybe better, since I’m just getting back in after being mostly out since just after Fallen Empires (about 6 years?).
Last weekend was “work on the car weekend†during which I took care of some deferred maintenance, so I haven’t made much progress in splitting the blogs yet. Originally, I planned to just put the anime blog in a subdomain named Omoikane, after the ship on Nadescio. Then, while debating blog names with Steven Den Beste (no, I didn’t take any of his oddball suggestions on Chizumatic!) and getting some help in Japanese, one name occurred to me that I was sure had to be taken. I checked just to be certain—thinking I’d discover a new anime blog, and maybe it would have some cheesecake.
Boy, was I wrong – to my surprise, no one had registered “bridgebunnies.com.†But….but! I know I saw it somewhere! What an oversight! Impossible! Sacré bleu! (Ugh, time to go wash my mouth out, I spoke French.) Anyway, I immediately fixed that terrible, terrible error. The internet must have bridge bunnies! While I was at it, I also grabbed “bridgebunnies.net†and “bridgebunnies.info,†for good measure, so copycats are going to have to settle for something else; “.tv” would be appropriate. (I finally remembered where I saw it: “Bridge Bunnies on My Mind†is one of the rotating titles on Jason Miao’s site.)
This left me in a quandary, because I kind of liked one of the titles I’d worked out with the invaluable assistance of Steven DenBeste and his friend HC. Before I go any further, I want to extend warm thanks to both of them for their help with the Japanese language and blog name suggestions. Thanks a bunch guys!
I was looking for something just a bit silly and over the top involving anime genres, but Magical Battle-Android Maid Girls just didn’t flow too well in English or Japanese: “Mahou Sentou you Andoroido Meido Shoujo†is a bit long and unwieldy. Trying to tack Meganekko onto that somewhere was just overkill. So at Steven’s suggestion, what I settled on is Mahou Medio Meganekko (Magical Maid ‘Glasses-Girl’) which will be appearing soon at bridgebunnies.com, .net, and info. I think Omoikane will survive as a subdirectory for screencaps or something. It’s going to be a bit of a complicated setup, because I’m going to try to strip all the anime posts from Houblog and move them over there. Fixing the screencap URL’s is going to be stone cold beyotch. I don’t see any way to easily do it (writing a script is beyond my pitiful PHP skills), and anyway, the database structure will be different, as I plan to start the new blog with WP 2.0.4. Unfortunately, this will probably cause me to lose most of the comments as well, since they’ll be as difficult to move as the posts. Still, it will finally split the politics from the anime/gaming/etc. It’s always been a touch bizarre as match-ups go–sort of like Fred Astaire and Anna Nicole Smith. It boggles the mind.
You know, I wonder…. Since I’m a government employee, can I get bridgebunnies.gov? I could claim to be the Emperor in an alternate dimension—how’s ICANN going to disprove it?
It could work….
Well, my first idea definately didn’t work…
UPDATE: Addon-domains don’t work like I thought they did. I thought it would appear to anyone from outside the site as a completely separate site; it would just use the same hosting account and resources as Houblog. Instead, it takes anyone typing in www.bridgebunnies.com and points them to the subdirectory and subdomain “bridgebunnies”; thus the viewer would see bridgebunnies.houblog.com. So I deleted it while I try to decide whether I’m going to spring for another account or not. Originally, that was my plan when I was going to go with omoikane.houblog.com, and I don’t suppose there’s any difference between that and bridgebunnies.houblog.com. And it would be much simpler if I didn’t have to move all the pictures from one site to another. But the reason I went with the domain name (outside of the fact that such a cool one was still available) was that Houblog and anime really don’t go together, and I wanted to separate the names, not just the blogs.
Sigh. Time to go look at hosting plans. Dammit, this hobby is starting to cost money. Correction: this hobby is also starting to cost money.
I went back to the drawing board, but along the way my browser tripped me up, so I managed to stick my pencil up my nose in the fall…
UPDATE 2:Ok, I am now totally confused. I purchased a new hosting plan to set up a second site, but when I log into the cpanel on it, the URL says bridgebunnies, but the cpanel says I’m in Houblog! All the databases, disk usage, stats, etc are from it. Jeez, that’s almost what I wanted in the first place…
Lesson #1, repetition 3,523 — when something weird is going on, just reboot.
UPDATE 3:Whatever the problem was, it’s fixed now. They’re seperated. Might have been an issue with my browser, or it might have been that they didn’t finish the setup until the invoice payment cleared. Weird. Edit: only now the placekeeper page has disappeared, and Fantastico won’t run; cpanel claims it can’t find it. And the move to a PHP 5+ server is still pending, but I can live with that; I don’t expect it to happen until tomorrow or later. I did want to get WP set up tonight though….
Enh, with the Fantastico auto-installer, it’s not like it took me a long time to do it the next day. I think my original set-up of Post Nuke took me something like 2 hours due to confusion and botches. WP was done in about 15 seconds. If that.
UPDATE 4: And they’ve got all three issues fixed by 11 am, when I only notified them of the last two just before 9 am. Hosting Matters just has great service, what can I say?
I love these guys! (er, actually, gals would be more appropriate, I think.)
