Kotowari 2.0: The Reckoning

I think you know where this is going

OK, so do you see this thing? Right here? This is Kotowari 2.0.

It took many months to come up with this layout. MONTHS. But I am proud to say that it is finally up and ready to go!

New Structure
This overhaul has been all about re-organizing. The site was expanding and it was starting to look cluttered and gross. Here are the changes, broken down.

Article Collections and FAQs
Above you will see that many of Roy’s articles are now compiled and organized by series, as well as a new FAQs section and some other stuff. This is legit, folks.

Blogroll
If Roy deemed you worthy, your link will be in the new blogroll. Don’t despair if you aren’t there – I’m sure a teary, bear-filled comment will do the trick.

Bit-Speak
This is a podcast Roy and I participate in with host Mikey, covering technology and games and I dunno, usually the nerd bar is set pretty high. So get used to seeing our illustrious mascot Challenge Frog in the corner of your eye when you are looking out for new podcasts.

Technical Details
Fuck you, I spent months slaving over this site, you will read how shit went down backstage.

Framework
The new look is built off of the Thematic framework which I highly recommend for those looking into versatile Wordpress parent themes. For a while I was all about custom-building everything from scratch, but fuck, why create from scratch a peg leg when somebody just threw a prosthetic leg into your fumbling arms?

CSS3
Rather than wasting precious load time on a bunch of .png images in nested divs, I opted for the cutting-edge browser technology of CSS3. It was a lot of fun taking liberties with this for Roy’s site because I don’t have to worry so much about his readers being stuck in the stone age when it comes to browsers. Yeah!

Video
Our vlogs from now on will be hosted by Vimeo for faster loading. The reason why I preferred our proprietary .flv format for so long was worrying about privacy, but luckily Vimeo offers pretty good security regarding un-wanted redistribution. If you browse the vlog archives you might see that our old vlogs are no longer popping up – don’t panic! – I am still in the process of converting them, too. I know your heart totally stopped for like a second as you immediately went to the vlog archive to verify this.

Commenting
What I am probably the most proud of is the completely overhauled commenting system. I played around with Intense Debate and was impressed with its powerful interface. But the smileys plug in was lame and not being able to have the bears was almost a deal breaker for me. Those bears are my babies, you know? They tie the site together and everybody loves them. Anyway, I contacted the amazing support at ID asking about a way to customize their smiley plug in. To my surprise, they e-mailed me back with the source of their plug in and encouraged me to hack into it. FUCK. YEAH. A couple weeks later, those bears were back and more badass than ever.

Not only that, but you can now sign in to comment using your OpenID, Facebook, Twitter info to make it even easier to let Roy know your thoughts. Or spam bears. If people reply to you with more bears? You will be on top of that shit because, son, you will be e-mailed every time somebody replies to your bearspam.

Ads
I decided to give Kotowari regulars a break from Google ads on the site and have them only show up for visitors who drunkenly stumbled here from Google image search after looking for gay LocoRoco porn. You’re welcome.

Honorable Mentions
Along with countless hours of music and metric tonnes of snacks, I couldn’t have built this site without the helpful feedback of Mikey.  He has put up with my foaming at the mouth about colors and borders and I NEED DEM BAERZ.  Roy also helped pushed the look-and-feel to its furthest potential and wouldn’t let me back down from design challenges.

Conclusion
It has been a long process but I am excited to have the new look up for Kotowari readers. There will be tweaks here and there in the next couple weeks, but in any case I hope the layout is easier and more fun to use. As much as I overhauled the site for Roy, by extension the hours that went into this project were for you, too. So until next time…

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