Stagnation

Sorry about the lack of visible updates. I'm sure Hitsuji-san is still plugging away, but I've been out of commission for personal reasons.

I had to get married. ^_^; And move to a new house. And so on, and so forth. So the viable, tangible updates will begin again as soon as I have 'net access at my new home (which should be this up-coming weekend, by the 24th) and all will be right with the world.

When that happens, I'll make it my goal to have some sort of real honest-to-goodness update at least once a week. But for now, I'm just going to try and settle into my home.

Just be happy that the PHP issues are being worked out behind the scenes...

The Pretty Back End is Coming

Yes, the stuff that people don't see. Since I finished the quiz, I'm working on the character profiles back end. Something I promised to do from 1999. ^^;; Yeah, that long. 10 years!

So OK, this doesn't look impressive, but it took me 10 hours to do! It's all php and mySQL. This puppy is reading from a database. When I have the input form, then the computer will read from that database and dump the pictures that Mako wants in order for a given character. Looks very little, but there are so many pages backing this one up it's not funny!

So cheer, I did something about the php issues.

tester

News/Information Update

I added the sad information of Kanabe Miyuki's death to her profile in the Musicals section under Cast- Sailormoon. Though this is relatively old news, for those who are unfamiliar with her Miyuki played the role of Sailormoon third in the Sailormoon Musicals run, beating out 500 other girls who auditioned for the role.

She had been struggling with poor health for a while recently until she finally passed away from heart failure on June 18th, 2008.

For more indepth news, check out this article.

Otherwise, nothing new to be added. I'm still plugging away on miscellaneous items for the site. Animated GIFs in Stardust Magic are almost completed. After those are complete I'll try to get some of the other sections sorted out and completed as well.

Quiz Me!

I posted some Sailor Moon quizzes using php5. Muhaha. The medium level is pretty difficult... When I get to it I'll make an Impossible Sailor Moon Quiz. Asking questions like what is the timestamp for Princess Serenity show up with the Golden Crystal in her hands? You'll be driven crazy by the lack of a given answer.

For now, enjoy the new game.

If you would like to suggest Sailor Moon Quiz Questions, go ahead and leave comments on this post.

Stardust Magic

Minor update notice for the first of July! I've been working to get out as many new, updated gifs for the magic section as possible. I have about 1/2 of them done now, so there's only about 30 left that I need for the anime. Included in this update is gifs for some of the rarer attacks in Sailormoon; including Sailor Body Attack!, Sailor Moon Kick!, and Super Supreme Thunder!. I'm working on completing the entire set, though. I realize having 30 left seems like a high number, but really it is quite a bit fewer than before. The bulk of the ones missing are transformations, I have most of the attacks made into new gifs. After I've completed the general set, I'll go back and make gif files of secondary versions of the same attacks- for example, all the Starlights have two different transformation sequences and two different attack sequences. I'm putting the longer, more complete versions of these up first but plan on making the other versions on as a secondary link later.

The quality of these animations are higher than the previous ones were. I noticed on a lot of our old files, the whole thing was shortened significantly- like taking out all the ribbons in Moon Prism Power, Make Up! or leaving out the water vortex in Neptune Planet Power, Make Up!. All the animations I've made have the full versions and are also (fairly) large so that you can see everything much easier. The only down side to this is that the files are also larger, making them take a bit longer to load. This isn't a big deal for people with uuber-fast internet, but the warning is out there for people still stuck on dial-up.

Once the remaining gifs are created, I'll make up a policy for using them on your own sites. Until then, please just leave them be.

Manga FAQ it Up

I cleaned the Sailor Moon Manga FAQ a little and added a bit more information. The file actually got smaller as I was editing. I traditionally edit it this time of year. This sweep mostly took out the long rambles and added in a section of the act summaries. I'll get to the Shinsouban eventually as well. However, I never got full translations of the Shinsoubon. My Japanese has improved a little though.

I went to Japan too and took pictures. I was supposed to learn PHP during that time, but unfortunately due to personal issues that I rather not disclose, I was unable to. I did take a picture of Shiba Daijingu which has some of the features shown in Hikawa Jinja in the manga. I have to pick those up today. (I had to use a film camera since my digital one broke.) A 360 view of the shrine is on the first page.

Given that I have to learn PHP 5 to fix up things like the character profiles, write quizzes, etc, and my college won't offer such a class, this might take a while to fix. Or if I can get in contact with my teacher, then maybe I can make it happen. I really do hope that I can learn PHP 5 and streamline this site more.

In the meantime, I'll try to find a way to fix the Sailor Moon Fan fiction section. I do need someone to help manage that section. If I can't find anyone... then it'll either have to be closed down or things will have to be posted manually.

Detail work...

I've been working to make minor corrections to the site, but nothing too new is out. The summaries for the musicals have been updated with corrections for the titles of the songs used. I've also fixed some broken links and made some minor corrections on profiles (for a while Diana's information said 'Artemis' for some reason... -_-; probably just over-looked, I guess).

I'm tentative to choose a major project that I am working on specficially on the site. After busting so hard for over six months on the layouts and content update that we last had, I'm afraid to label anything specific as something I'm planning on getting done in X amount of time.

Things I'm hoping to accomplish, however, at some point:
1- Update the links out. Delete obsolete websites and add in some new ones. (For example, we don't even have a link to the Oracle on there yet, and that site is certainly the biggest Sailormoon-related website around today.)

2- Update animated GIF files in the magic section. This project is about 1/3 complete. I'm trying viciously to get all of them made by me so I can ensure the quality of the images and the length of animation. As a result, there are several new ones that have been updated that I created that are different and higher quality than previous ones. This project is tedious, however, because attention is paid to individual frames of the animation and I have to get screen caps myself. Some things aren't too bad (the inner senshi's attacks from the SuperS season, for instance, all were on average 6 seconds long.) but others are significantly longer (most of Sailormoon's attacks and transformations verge on almost 1 minute of length!) and just take a bit more time. An example would be these two recently updated GIFs - Mars Flame Sniper took about 15-20 minutes to complete, including screen cap time while Starlight Honeymoon Therapy Kiss took about 2 hours. The length is just that much different. I'm trying to get a bit done with this every day (I promised myself one a day at least, but lately it's been more like 4-8 done a day) so this should be done relatively quickly, unless I completely burn out on it (which is totally possible.)

3- I want to create new individual layouts for the for the shrines. The layouts that are out now aren't compatible with all browsers, so I want to make sure to fix that preferably sooner than later. However, since they also tend to be a bit stagnant this isn't a major priority to me yet. Eventually, the whole of the site should be bustling and awesome.

4- Places guide. This is something that we are, believe it or not, working on. The thing is that most of this is occurring behind the scenes in the form of snapping up images and filing them away. Eventually, information will be available for all locations and images to support them. This will include not just places as seen in the anime, but also in the manga as well.

And that's about it. Sorry about the long-winded posting with no real meat for updates. I just wanted to let you know that I'm working, at least on my end, to ensure that this site is shaping into the best that it can be. In the mean time, hopefully Hitsuji will be writing articles in bare-bones HTML and sending them to me via email. I figure that I don't mind doing the leg-work to find the images, etc, to back it up. That is my job, after all, to deal with the visuals of this site.