R.I.P. AnimeLyrics.tv.

So late last year I wrote about how there was some fallout between the people who ran the original AnimeLyrics.com, which led to the existing site to be booted to AnimeLyrics.tv. After that, things pretty much went back to normal, with both sites kind of ignoring each other's existence. The community in the AL.tv forums was what everyone loved the site for, and that stayed the same.

Some time after that, the founder of AL.com-now-.tv passed away. Long-time mods kept the site going, though the code was pretty decrepit and had been for a long time.

Well, the owner of AL.com (who, in some series of events I don't really understand, has been in a war with some cybersquatter or something) has finally decided to pull the plug on AL.tv. Sometime tomorrow, the forum will be deleted forever. I guess it's hard to convey how sad it is. This is a community many people thought was home. It was civil, it was amazingly intelligent, and it was fairly stable. I don't think I will ever see its like again.

Some people from the forum started up animelyricsanon, which I hope will grow into a good community, but it just won't be the same. [But at least it means I won't have to just bug japanese all the time with my lyrics problems.]

Anyway, with the site going away, and no plans to merge its database with AL.com's (which would be pretty difficult at this point), I tried to pull as many lyrics of mine off the site as I could. [The one major effect of being booted to the .tv domain was the fact that Google for a long time still listed results for AL.com. I guess it finally started spidering AL.tv, but not all of it, so I was only able to find about half my lyrics that way.] I don't think I want to submit them to AL.com, though, so I figured I would start a lyrics site on my own. [One thing that makes me really sad about AL.tv going away is the abrupt decentralization of lyrics resources. Many contributors have their personal translation sites, but it's going to be so much harder to find stuff going forward.] I actually had the lyrics site idea a long time ago, back when I translated J-Pop off of romaji I found online -- there are a lot of Globe and Da Pump lyrics that I never submitted to AL.tv, but that I put in a folder called "lyrics" in my websites folder, with the plan that I'd post them someday.

As often happens when these ideas seize me, I moved very quickly. I decided I wanted some kind of content management system for this -- manually generated pages would just become a pain after a while. I've been wanting to convert the Winamp skins site to WordPress for a long time but been daunted by what I've heard is a pretty steep learning curve for using WordPress. So I decided the lyrics page would be a good test run.

...and, here it is. I probably should have been doing a lot of other things this weekend, but that's what came out instead. WordPress wasn't as scary as I thought, I guess, but I think I've barely skimmed the surface of true template development. The layout I have right now is an eyesore -- I basically cannibalized the classic theme. The web design part will come later. [Probably much later, given my track record with web design lately.]

But here are some things that I learned, really quickly, that I'm proud of:
- how to use custom fields
- how to get the romaji and translation to display in columns
- how to make archive pages display an alphabetized table instead of a blog-style list

I guess I've always been good at using cannibalized examples, trial and error, and brute force to work with unfamiliar systems (CSS in the past, and PHP here). ^^;;

Dream home meme.

Stolen from xen0glossy:

Your home is a Wizard's Hideout Your kitchen is manned by a team of Keebler Drow Elves. Your master bedroom is decorated to look like the treetop village of the Galadhrim. Your study has every fantasy novel ever written, including multiple editions of the Silmarillion and advance copies of Dungeons and Dragons Fifth Edition. Your home also includes a roost for griffons. You've never actually seen a griffon, but you keep the roost ready anyway. Your guests enjoy your home theater with hi-def plasma screen TV, and the thrones you watch it from. Outside is the moat that protects your home from goblin invaders and extended family. And, you have a pet -- a unicorn named "Shadowhooves". Below is a snippet of the blueprints:

Build YOUR Dream Home!

I am almost as amused by the fact that a site that helps you find [real] homes would have something like this as I am with the result. XD But I wish I had a wizard's tower...

ETA: Okay, I admit I changed my result. Because there is no justice in the world if I can't have multiple copies of the Silmarillion and a master bedroom that looks like Caras Galadon. Plus, I think the only thing I had to change was saying I'd rather go to Disneyworld than eat. o_O;;

Also, in the process of rigging my results, I discovered that there are hilarious snarky comments that appear if you select certain options. Like Disneyworld pops up "Because waiting in lines is FUN." and exercise gets you "Weirdo." Broadway plays gets you "Your gender has been set to FEMALE." This is truly the most awesome quiz evar. XD