Happy first Advent, readers! The best time of the year is upon us: Christmas. It has snow, cold, red warm colors and a friendly atmosphere! In terms of blogging, this means more posts such as “12 Days of Christmas” and also yearly lists featuring the best anime of the year among other things!
In other news, I can happily announce that Anime Viking now has its own domain! When the blog turned two years old, I realized I had come a long way. As such, it would be natural to have my own domain since I knew I would continue to blog for a long time to come.
However, even so, I was a little bit hesitant. If I were to have my own domain, why not also switch to custom blog hosting? I had also come across some odd rumors about custom domains making the SEO worse. With this in mind, I decided to do some research and learn more about anything related to self-hosting.
Then, I came to a conclusion. Yes, I would purchase my own domain. The reason I decided to give it a go was to make Anime Viking a little fancier. In addition, it is a way to assure that the blog will not disappear any time soon. It was, as mentioned earlier, a natural next step to take. Plus, it was cheap.
Everything is the same as before, albeit with a different domain name. In fact, old links actually re-direct to the correct website pages! But if you discover any mistakes, please tell me. Especially when it comes to different feeds and readers, as I do not use them myself.
So.
How does it look?
Anime Viking 
Congratulations!
And well, I think new domain but still hosted on wordpress.com means everything is alright, due to the map-sites and all, but I too heard that rumor. I suspect it might be a self-propagating rumor.
I purchased something from wordpress.com as well, the “Customize” options.
Well, congrats on sticking around for this long, and good luck on life being good enough for you to keep at it (I won’t say “Easy”, because wishing an “easy life” might be like wishing an underachieving life on someone :3).
Much swag.
Thank you!
Oh, and nice that you can customize now! If I wanted to do that, I’d just get my own hosting. Hope you can make some nice customizations to your theme 🙂
Well, I began by CSS testing to see if I could keep my old theme, heh, then ended up getting a new theme and fixing some stuff – I don’t think I’ll change more things currently.
What I changed:
1. Lowered amount of space above header.
2. Made the main text area’s background white, people seemed to prefer over the off-white it used to be, like your blog.
3. Changed the colour of URLs to blue, it being the same colour as normal text was atrocious, considering how often I link within posts.
4. Step #3 caused the captions of images to turn vivid blue as well – which is what I think happened to you with the orange, BTW, so I forced that colour to not take links’ colours.
5. Changed the way images with captions work, so they won’t get indented past the page’s limits >.>
Since this was my first time messing with CSS, and sometimes things would look fine in my preview but not on the site, it took several hours >.>
I didn’t get my own hosting because that’s a true hassle 😛 Heh. I mostly did small fixes to my theme, the goal was to make the blog more readable, and then the fixes were to sand off some rough spots.
Congratulations I guess.
Also, your category bar is fucked up.
Thanks!
And yep, the category bar is messed up on this theme. That’s one of the issues with Dusk to Dawn. Afraid no can do, unless I switch theme.
Hmm, now I’m wondering about getting a domain.
Oh? It’s your choice!
*o* congratulations!
Thank you 😀
Taking the next step eh? Well done dood. Well done. Soon you will rule the aniblogosphere.
Moahahaha, it’s the first step to world domination!
Another step forward 🙂 Nice one.
I can see something off with the category bar; is it because of the length of categories you use in your posts? I’ve heard of a plugin that can rectify that and make the bar smaller, but don’t quote me.
Your comment in the “Two years of blogging” post spurred me on 🙂
The category bar has always been messed up on this theme, sadly. I cannot do anything about it, since I’m using WordPress.com without any CSS upgrade.
Your category drop down menu has a greater width than the side bar that is should be in.
Yes, I know.
Gee, why do people suddenly point it now when it’s always been like that? 😛
I have to say, you’re weeks too late in getting into the Halloween spirit with that Orange man. So lame!!!
(Other than that, congrats. I think!)
I have no idea why WordPress decided to mess with my theme earlier today! 😦
(thanks! now it’s your turn to get a domain)
The only thing that changed is the comments color thats it. But it’s nice to get a domain so more visitors can enjoy reading and stuff. However, in this case, you also have to learn more codings especially PHP for sidebars, if you want to add more stuff. WordPress.com is for adding PHP codes and is a good way to handle blog posts and stuff like that
As mentioned above, the weird colors are because of WordPress. It is not because of me. It will hopefully revert back to normal in a day or two, otherwise I will have to contact support. It has nothing to do with the domain change, just a poor coincidence.
And, once again, as mentioned above, I cannot alter the theme design. Whoever created the theme forgot to think of extended sidebars. This has been an issue since I changed to this theme a year ago.
I also bought something for my blog since I know I won’t be quitting blogging anytime soon. But for me, it had nothing to do with themes or customizations or anything – I buy mascots.. xD I know there haven’t been much work done if you look at my blog now, but I’m actually working on “personifying” my blog now using pictures of my mascots. Again, you probably never realized it and it’s understandable since I haven’t been able to do much on this side, but I do have some plans.
Anyway, congrats! I’m not sure if I want to get my own domain. The access to all kind of features seems tempting, especially on the customization side, but then again, I barely know anything about CSS >_>
I’ve seen that you have a mascot, actually! Is there any reason why you want to have one? 😮
And thanks! You can do a lot just by knowing the basics and then following tutorials. Besides, you can always do it by trial and error!
HTML & CSS are easy. just learn it here:
http://www.w3schools.com/
I do know basic HTML and CSS. Why? I already said I cannot alter the themes on WordPress.com without any paid upgrade.