Long time no see! It’s been four months since our last post, and we’re not planning on letting that number get any bigger. After a year of falling behind self-set deadlines and watching my schoolwork slowly chip away at the time I dedicate to this blog, Ani-Gamers is finally back! Plus, I designed a new content management system in 2011, called “Tofu,” and it now forms the administrative backbone of our blog. It has a number of features that should help to alleviate the problem of my schoolwork ruining our posting schedule, but I make no promises just yet.
Since we dropped off into a sort of unofficial hiatus, many of our contributors have branched out and found other anime, manga, and video game websites to write for: Elliot is at UK Anime Network, Ink created Drunken Otaku, Mitchy is at IGN, and Evan (Krell) and Kyle (a.k.a. Lwelyk) are still hard at work over at Insert-Disc. Nevertheless, I’m happy to announce that Ink, Elliot, Evan, Chris (a.k.a. Kit Inaka), and Sean will remain with us at Ani-Gamers as we relaunch for the coming year. And, to those who have moved on to bigger and better things, such as Uncle Yo, Mitchy, Kyle, and Hayley, we wish nothing but the best!
That said, we’re looking for a couple of new people to join our team. If you’re an opinionated fan with a strong passion for writing words about cartoons and video games on the Internet, check out our Help Wanted page for more information on how to apply.
Now, a little update on the new blog. We’re refocusing our content a bit, so, in addition to the usual reviews, expect more regular news briefs, a couple new recurring columns, and more episodes of the Ani-Gamers Podcast. (Plus a few backlogged posts from before our content frequency sputtered out.) This site, is, as always, a constantly changing work in progress, so please remember to provide us with feedback along the way about how much we suck (or how great we are).
Oh yes, the new layout! How could I forget? As you might have noticed, I decided to make a new blog layout to go with the new blogging platform (let’s call it “Ani-Gamers 4.0” for theatricality’s sake). It’s not too functionally different from the old layout — featured posts are still up top and the sidebar has all the goodies you’re used to — but now posts have nice graphic representations of their type and categories to the left. Click on any of those buttons to find similar posts, and use the “Explore” tab in the sidebar to search the blog by traditional search or by selecting a type, category, or author.
If you’re still reading our humble blog after such an embarrassingly long drought, I want to thank you for sticking with us. And if you’re new to Ani-Gamers, welcome aboard! I hope to see you in the comments sometime.