Claire’s Random Thoughts

To Anime fans out there: You probably hate the slow torrent anime downloads or low quality youtube videos. Of course there are some direct download sites out there, but they’re either just as slow as torrents, infiltrated with ads, or cost money. Don’t you wish you could download your favorite series with direct downloads of decent speed? That’s why Anime Dreamer was created!

This site is fairly new, so there might currently be a limited selection. However, series are being added at a quicker rate than the rate at which I can watch them. Current hosted series are: Bartender, Rescue Wings, Death Note, REC, Itsudatte My Santa (single episode), and Densha Otoko.

Animedreamer.info is also great, because there are very few ads. Most download sites that host large files also have lots of ads to pay for the bandwidth, but on Anime Dreamer, there is only one leaderboard on each page of the main site, and the user even has the option of hiding it if he/she wishes to browse without distractions.

If you do not have site statistics built in with your web hosting provider, then I would recommend google analytics for very detailed statistics. When I first started this blog, I just used a freewebs counter to count page views. However, this did not tell me how many pages each visitor viewed, how many new/repeat visitors I had, or where my main sources were. Therefore, a couple days after I made this blog, I started using google analygics. Here are some of my statistics for those of you who want to see how google analytics is like:

Google analytics tells me how many of my visitors were new and how many were repeats. I seem to get mostly new visitors, but a few loyal visitors are returning. This is good in the sense that a lot of different people are looking at my blog but bad in the sense that not that many are bookmarking it and coming back later. Oh well, the main reason most poeple visit sites is for information. Once they get that information, they usually leave…

My traffic is still very unstable. If I write an interesting technical article and sumbit it to digg and reddit, then I get a lot of hits for a few hours. Once the story gets a few hours old, the visitors decline. I guess I still need more updated information if I want more visitors from those two sites. I have also been losing traffic since I have been posting less in bloggerforum. My signature was a link to my blog, and I often posted links to my blog with relevant information to certain threads.

Most of my visitors are still from the United States. This doesn’t surprise me that much, because a lot of the major computer nerds are from here.

It looks like I get links from various sources. The two big ones are digg and reddit, because they get lots of visitors themselves. I’m guessing that most of the direct requests are repeat visitors who have bookmarked me. Posting on bloggerforum and 110mb forums have also helped me a bit. It’s nice to see that I have a variety of sources, because 22.12% are still from other places. I’m guessing those places include some other forums, my xanga, and my main site.

Pretty graph! People are entering my blog at many different posts

I found this interesting. Statistically, over 60% of all internet users use Internet Explorer while a little over 30% use Firefox. Most of the other browsers are almost never used, for example, Opera is used less than 1% of the time. It’s interesting how since most of my visitors are webmasters, internet explorer is less popular. Firefox is the most popular browser among webmasters, because it actually is not only easy to use, but safer. Most of the more technologically experience people use Firefox.

Also interesting how my main audience is more likely to use an operating system other than Windows. Over 95% of all internet users use windows, but only 83.99% of my visitors were using it. Windows actually does suck, but I’m just using it because it has basically become the standard and is more compatible.

HAHAHAHAHA! I can’t believe 8.14% were still using dialup.

I first got introduced to Opera, because I was just browsing betlik’s general discussion forum. Somebody advertised it as the fastest browser, so I decided to try it. Why spend exta time waiting for things to load when you do not have to?
Compared to Firefox, Opera didn’t seem bad for loading pages. When I tried to download large files, however, it actually seemed slower. I’m probably still going to use Opera in the future for its other features. It seems to be more complicated and has more built-in features than Firefox does in addition to some widgets that you can add on.

One thing I like about it is that it’s smarter when you’re using a WYSIWYG editor and you press enter, you go onto the next line do rather than going on to the next paragraph and skipping a line. One thing that drove me nuts in internet explorer and Firefox was needing to open the html editor and waste time letting it load just so I could add one little thing to a new line in a post but not start a new paragraph.

I also like how you can start browsing from how you last left the browser rather than starting at a home page every time. I can even have multiple tabs opened with my favorite sites whenever I start the browser.

Opera is also smarter in opening things with the target “_new” or “_blank. Instead of opening those in a new window, you just get a new tab. I hate having too many windows open at the same time, so this feature makes my life easier. Now I don’t have to keep right clicking and clicking open in a new tab whenever something’s target is a new window.

Another feature, although not that important, is the hover over thumbnail feature. If you are browsing with tabs and you put your cursor over a tab, then you get a thumbnail of the page of the tab that you are hovering over.

There is bittorrent support so you do not have to download torrents from a regular torrent client, but I haven’t gotten it to work yet. I think I would probably still prefer bitcomet.

Those were just a few examples of the features. If you are interested in this browser, then visit Opera’s page.

Some potential drawbacks are the fact that it uses more CPU power and that all pages may not be designed for it. Some template designs do not look the way they are supposed to in Opera. Since it’s not that popular of a browser, I doubt many webmasters optimize their pages for it. I have not had a huge problem with this yet, but since things do not look exactly the same in Opera as they would in the more popular browsers, some templates could be distorted. Overall, Opera is still a nice browser that should be worth trying.

So, what’s different between this screen and the old gmail home page? Cough* cough* look towards the bottom left. Someone brought this to my attention yesterday morning, but I didn’t feel like publishing three posts in the same day.
The storage is stuck at 2800 mb and not increasing by its usual 4 bytes per second anymore. Are google employees afraid that they’ll run out of storage space, or is this just another bug like the contact list hacks? Somehow I think that if every account used even half of its full 2800 mb, google would be screwed. If you use a lot of storage then they’ll give it to you, but they don’t expect the majority of their users to use the full 2800 mb.
Oh well, I’m guessing that most normal people can’t use that much storage anyway. If you happen to use something like gmail drive for backup, then you probably have multiple accounts anyway: one for mail and some others for file storage.

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Update: storage is increasing again.

My search for a good free form processor consisted of a lot of disappointment and uneasiness. Every time I thought I found a good one, there would be either intrusive ads or some kind of limit in functions.

Why do I want a form generator anyway? It’s not safe to post my email on my site these days due to the high level of possible spam, but I would like a way for my visitors to contact me.

Phew, this annoying search and experiment process ended when I discovered formbuddy. Formbuddy allows me to create custom forms asking for whatever information I choose to ask for, and I can place them on my site with a professional look, just as if I had created the form myself. An example of such a form would be the one for my link exchange offer.
Here’s a screenshot if you’re too lazy to click on the link:

I always have all the data emailed to me rather than stored on formbuddy’s servers, but you can also store form submissions on formbuddy’s servers if you don’t like getting so many emails, some of which may be nonsense. I haven’t had a problem with spam yet, but I think it might be possible if somebody is bored enough to submit forms of nonsense.

After the user submits a form, he/she should be directed to any page you specify. This is usually a thank you page or a the same page that the form is placed on. Formbuddy will put a frame on the side with ads and say that the form was their’s, but I guess I can live with that. Only form submitters will see that anyway, so it should not be viewed that frequently
Formbuddy also allows you to store up to 500 forms for free so that you can later modify them or retrieve the code if needed.

How to customize the forms more:
The original form builder only gives you the options of inputting name, e-mail, gender, date of birth, address, country, phone, url, how did you find us, and comments/suggestions. The code generated is also design for a full html page rather than just a section of your page.
My suggestion for further customization is to first just check a few of those boxes and then click generate form. Chances are, you don’t want a full page just for your form, so cut out the top of the html code until and including the tag as well as the and and on the bottom.

How to customize inputs:
If you want the user to input a string, then use copy and paste the section of the code for name input like the one below.

Change the part that says Name: to whatever you want to be displayed, and change the part that says visitor_name to whatever you want to be displayed next to the input string in the email that will be sent to you.
If you would like a radio button input, then I recommend that you modify the Gender code.

original
Just adjust everything similarly to what you would do for the first example.
If you would like a dropdown menu with a few options, then I recommend modifying the how did you find us? code in the same way that you would do to the above two examples. I will skip explaining what to do, because it seems self-explanatory to any experienced webmaster.

Conclusively, formbuddy is one of the better free form generators out there, because it is customizable and appears ad free on your pages that you place forms on. I would definitely recommend it to those who do not have the server capacity to have a form or do not know how to create a form.

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Blog update:
I just removed a whole bunch of links in my links section. Those were from blogs that I was going to exchange links with but were owned by someone who didn’t add me yet. If you are one of these people and still wish to exchange, you must add me and then fill out the link exchange form telling me that you did. After this, I will put you back.