Cherry blossom season, 2011

Welcome back to the second installment of Otaku Journalist’s trip down memory lane. This time, I’m looking at 11 posts from 2011.

2011 was a completely different year. I got a job as a Flash developer (yes, we were still using Flash in 2011!) and then left in June for my first real journalism job at the Daily Dot. It was a year full of changes and my blog reflects that.

Here are some of my favorite posts from 2011:

1) Katsucon from a wheelchair

When life gives you lemons, etc. etc. I wasn’t about to miss Katsucon just because I broke my foot. This was the year that I was covering the Katsucon fan-art policy fiasco and it was important to me to interview the half-empty Artist’s Alley artists no matter what. Seeing Katsucon from another perspective taught me about how cons can cater to the disabled, too.

2) Should anime conventions screen for sex offenders?

I love anime fandom, which is why I don’t just write about the sunny side of it. If we fans don’t address those in our community who would prey on fans, we’re no better. This Twitter discussion occurred after a man pleaded guilty to coercing a minor at Katsucon 2010.

3) I want to be a voice actor! A surprise interview with Dan Green

In true Otaku Journalist fashion, I called up a major voice acting studio and asked for an interview, even though I wasn’t affiliated with any news blog. I told them my personal blog had loyal readers, and that was good enough for them. What I didn’t know was that the voice acting teacher they paired me with would be Dan Green, the voice of Yugi from Yu Gi Oh! 

4) An open letter to Kotaku intern Jen Schiller

I really related to Kotaku’s latest intern, Jen, after one of her articles made a lot of gamers really angry. It wasn’t really about right or wrong, but about catering to an angry male audience. Back in my internship days, I did the same thing! I wanted to write to Jen and let her know that one mistake wasn’t the end of her career and also that she wasn’t alone.

5) How I ended up writing about cat ears, maids, and furries for Forbes

And here it is, the turning point in my journalistic career. I won Susannah Breslin’s contest for young female journalists, and this gave me the exposure I needed to find a job in the field. The best part was learning that I really could write about the things I love for a living.

6) The joy and terror of teaching college

This was also the year I started teaching at my alma mater! I was 25 years old, looked 15, and the students could smell my fear. Even so, this experience shaped me and teaching is one of the three career paths I want to consider for the rest of my life.

7) What I learned about journalism in San Francisco

I’ll never forget the whirlwind that was my first six months at the Daily Dot. I met Owen, whom I still work for today, just at another outlet now. Writing about fandom and Internet culture full time, while traveling to cool cities like San Francisco, Boston and Austin, I learned that there really doesn’t have to be a division between who I am and what I do for work.

At the Renaissance Faire, October 2011

8) The Otaku Journalist Manifesto

Here it is, the set of core beliefs that would, two years later, become my first book.

9) Has anime gone too mainstream?

“Anime has always been cheap and weird. But that’s part of why we like it.” That was a quote that stuck with me from Otakon. I like my cheap weirdness, sure, but I also am glad that higher production values are luring in more viewers and keeping anime fandom alive.

10) How a civil war reenactment is like an anime convention

I had been reading a lot of creative nonfiction at the time, and that’s what shaped this essay. If you’ve never been to a civil war reenactment, I’ll tell you this: they’re as diverse a group of nerds as you’d meet at any fandom convention!

11) What to do when you think your fandom is misunderstood

This was also the year I assisted with a Washington Post article about Otakon. On the tail of that “coercing a minor” case from earlier in the year, this story wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. It was a moment of reflection for me as a fan as I tried to wrestle with the good and the bad of being a fandom reporter, something I still haven’t resolved today.

Want more? Check out Otaku Journalist’s 10 top posts from 2010.

Me blogging at Otakon in August 2010

If you just started visiting Otaku Journalist, you are really missing out.

I do try hard to keep up Otaku Journalist, but the truth is now that I have lots of jobs, I don’t spend as much time coming up with and writing posts as I once did. Back in 2010, when I had just finished graduate school and was underemployed at a gym, Otaku Journalist was my biggest priority and what I considered my primary job.

Lately I’ve been trying to think of ways to make Otaku Journalist better and the answer seems to lie in these archives. I spent a lot of time perfecting my posts back then and it’s too bad I had like, ten readers total at the time. Since a lot of my survey respondents say they just started reading Otaku Journalist, these oldies are worth resurfacing.

Here are 10 of my favorite posts from the 2010 archives, accompanied by horrible photos of me from the same time!

1) Sex sells but is blogging sex “selling out?”

I don’t think anyone cares about “selling out” anymore in a time when we’re all just trying to pay off our student loans as quickly as possible. At the time I wrote this, I was running Project Wonderful ads on Otaku Journalist for some extra cash, and a drawing of a busty warrior kept appearing on my site even when I thought I’d blocked it.

This post isn’t so much about the cover of the new Persona game as it is about me coming to terms with whether my new identity as a feminist meant I would have to take a stand against sexism when I saw it even when that wasn’t the topic I was asked to write about.

2) Here’s to you, Red Shirt Guy

In our day and age, it’s a lot more “cool” to act sarcastic and disinterested than it is to be earnestly infatuated with something. That’s probably why fandom in all its forms is such a big target—it’s easy to make fun of us because it’s so apparent we care about something.

Red Shirt Guy was a World of Warcraft fan who knew more about the game than some creators, and as a result was called a nerd. It’s paid off for him though; a quick Google search shows that since I wrote this, he got his own NPC (non-playable character) in the game!

3) Interview with Brian Raftery, freelance pop culture writer for Wired

Today there are a lot of people who do what I do, and run profitable blogs about fandom and subculture. But at the time, I thought the job I wanted didn’t exist. Brian was one of the people who inspired me to keep going, and graciously offered an interview to me, unknown and unemployed, because I wanted to write about him on my personal blog.

I love the way Brian treats all of his subjects, from the Insane Clown Posse to Ben Huh of I Can Has Cheezburger, with enthusiasm and respect. His reporting style was certainly one that I looked at when devising my Otaku Journalism philosophy.

 

Getting my minimum wage on in October 2010

4) Welcome to the NHK, work, and life

I watched Welcome to the NHK while I was underemployed and very unsatisfied with the trajectory my life was taking. If you feel like you are at a similar point in your own life, I highly recommend you pick up the show right now.

I’ve said before that this is one of the anime that has changed my life. The most important line to me was Sato’s: “As long as I am working toward something I care about, I am not a NEET.” Whenever I am feeling complacent, this is what I think about to get back on track.

5) A squid comes to town, a squid leaves town

Squid Girl is an innocent romp about a literal squid girl, so this literary criticism of its season finale is definitely an overanalysis. But the finale was so self aware and introspective and almost mystical—such a dramatic change of pace for a light comedy.

I actually wrote this post for Japanator. Remember when I wrote for them?

6) My life as an otaku, my life as a journalist

Looking back, this is a real Bizarro world kind of post. I wrote about how I understated my geeky side when applying for jobs in order to be the right “fit” for as many companies as possible. Today, that is exactly what I advise NOT to do!

In the end, it was my geeky enthusiasm that has gotten me every single job I have ever been hired for in my life. So I wouldn’t take this post to heart.

7) Kaichou wa Maid Sama! and female strength

The only photo I actually like of me being a weeaboo from December 2010.

I watched some awesome shows in 2010. I remember discussing Kaichou wa Maid Sama! with Patches almost immediately after we met.

8) Anime USA Prospectus 2010

Fact you might not know about me: I also love graphic design, though I’m not very good at it. Fact number two: I did some graphic design for a local anime convention.

9) Thanks Jezebel! 

Almost forgot I made Jezebel. This is my first major media mention ever and even though I was later on Boing Boing, Media Bistro and others, this one is close to my heart.

10) What’s the appeal of cat ears? 

Still one of the top ten most popular posts on the site. People REALLY like cat ears.

Thanks for taking this trip into the past with me. Now get in your time machine and get back to 2014. Stay tuned for next Wednesday: 11 posts from 2011!

Things have been a little crazy in Otaku Journalist land. At one point two weeks ago, I counted that I had six different jobs. I was maintaining multiple WordPress sites, writing a curriculum for my WordPress course, putting the finishing touches on my next book, and of course reporting for ReadWrite, blogging, and maintaining my business as usual.

Last week, however, was just the opposite. It seemed like everything finished up at once. Now I’m back to normal and feel like I have way too much time on my hands.

I decided to put that time to good use by doing some maintenance around my blog. Otaku Journalist is nearly five and I’ve had a list of things I’ve needed to update and fix.

Anyone who’s been running a blog for a awhile can relate to how upkeep slips through the cracks. So I’m sharing some tips for keeping an old blog running like new:

Update the user experience

You might notice some ever-so-slight changes to the look and feel of Otaku Journalist. That’s because I finally set up a child theme for it.

WordPress sites get their appearance information from themes, templates designed by developers all over the world. If you know a little HTML and CSS, you can customize your theme’s design. But when the original developer spots a bug or a security issue, you need to update your theme and lose all those custom design changes. So as a result of doing this, I hadn’t been updating my theme and it’s been getting slowly buggier.

The alternative is to create a child theme, a theme that inherits the functions of the developer’s theme, but can host its own custom design. This is so easy, it’s something I taught my WordPress bootcamp how to do in one weekend. But I had been putting it off until now. Now the site is running Purple Pro Child so I can update Purple Pro whenever its developer does.

Another user experience change? I’ve finally added Disqus comments. I’ve been meaning to do this since the reader survey in May. Not everyone likes Disqus, but let’s try them out for a bit and see if they make commenting less of an ordeal. You can finally edit your own comments!

But seriously, I wish I had installed Disqus for WordPress much earlier. It took almost 24 hours to migrate my existing 2,500+ comments to the new system!

Optimize your site speed

With five years of posts, images, and data, Otaku Journalist is getting bulky. I’ve started to notice page loading speeds suffer as a result.

The first thing I did was go to Page Speed Grader to see what was taking so long. Before I did anything, it was taking nearly 6 seconds to load, which is noticeably slow. And after assessing the issues, I installed a couple useful WordPress plugins:

• W3 Total Cache, a plug-in that caches elements on your page to improve loading time.
• EWWW Image Optimizer, a bulk image lossless compressor. It took an hour for it to go through every image ever seen on Otaku Journalist and compress it.
• Leverage Browser Caching Ninjas, a one-hit wonder that does for free what W3 Total Cache will only do in the paid upgrade.

Now each page comes up in about 3 seconds, cutting load time in two with just a few installs.

Update static pages

I (usually) update my blog once a week, but when’s the last time I even looked at my About pages? And these are the vital first links on my site that new visitors click!

Two of them, About the Site and About the Author, were still linking to my non-existent digital journalism guides instead of my new book. Tiny missteps like that can keep new readers from even realizing I have a book out there at all.

Most of the changes, however, I made to my portfolio site. It was so out of date it didn’t even list my business name on my resume or display any portfolio pieces later than February, which probably makes it look to potential employers like I’ve been out of work that whole time.

Maybe this tip seems obvious to you. But I always forget that even though these static pages seem old to me, they’re brand new to first-time readers and absolutely essential to keep up.

I hope you’re enjoying the new and improved Otaku Journalist! What are some regular maintenance you do to keep up your blog?