My little background edits to Kuriousity are just about complete! Apologies for the lack of posts the last couple days because of it. Worry not – there’s plenty of news and reviews on the horizon, plus I’ve been helping on another side project this weekend that’s turning out pretty neat as well (though let it be known that Drupal is not as user friendly as I would like!).

Most changes shouldn’t be evident to visitors but some may notice the new URLs (goodbye, ugly =?/ symbols!) and that the review index page has received a much needed overhaul. This includes the addition of some missing reviews, link corrections and all the genres have been combined to one long alphabetical list.

And now it’s back to working on some actual content updates. Keep an eye out soon for the beginning of Kuriousity’s countdown to Halloween and in a couple weeks the company news from Yaoi Con.

Hey all – this is a quick warning that I’ll be doing some site work this evening. This will include some optimization for faster loading, far prettier URLs and a revamped review index.

This also means that things could be a little rocky around here until I smooth out all the bumps, inparticular with some broken links. Please bear with me as I do my best to get everything tidied up. If you come across something that seems more broken than it should be, please don’t hesitate to utilize my contact form to let me know. It’s much appreciated!

Thanks for your patience and please keep checking back for more news and reviews :)

Admist my graduating from school, finishing the last days of my current part-time jobs and packing in prepreation for my move at the end of the month (so many books but so worth any pain, spare any potential broken backs), I’ve been toiling away at this new layout. Yay!

I’ve been thinking Kuriousity needed an upgrade for a while now and in this new layout I hope to have addressed most of the different requests and issues my site visitors have brought up. Credit for the design’s base goes to Bingo Web Design (edit: link added). Along with the new look, there’s now a variety of new additions:

• The post share feature, which allows you to easily share what I’ve posted on a variety of different network sites
• A handy little e-mail form for those who’d like to make quick contact
• A new sidebar addition where you can view the most recent posts and comments, along with see what posts are currently the most popular
• Reorganized and nested Category list
• Post comments have been overhauled to include Gravatar-powered avatars and nested administrator replies

The About and Review list sections have been tidied up and I’ve added the most popular current categories to the top of the site’s navigation to make finding what you’re looking for all the easier.

Also, since April’s Book of the Month, Winter Demon (Vol. 04), went up a little early and I’ll be busy moving at the end of the month, May’s Book of the Month is going up a few days early. Welcome to the sidebar for a month, Pluto (Vol. 01)! Well worth a read.

I hope people like the new look as much as I do, and that it works well for everyone. Though I’m still doing a few tweaks on pages, I can only do so much troubleshooting on my end so I’d greatly appreciate it if you could let me know if there’s anything that doesn’t seem to be working right. :) Thanks in advance and enjoy Kuriousity’s new look!

I’d noticed that I wasn’t recieving many pingbacks or comments here at Kuriousity in recent weeks, coincidentally since I updated to the new Word Press at the time. Well today I upgraded my WP yet again, only to discover the option to splunk through the comments that WordPress automatically labelled as spam. And splunked I did! And found many comments left by people that I had never seen  :( So if you’ve left a comment in the last month or so and wondered why I didn’t respond or approve it, I apologize! I spent a good while clearing them all out today and approving around 30 comments. Many thanks (and apologies) to you all!

And saddly, if that wasn’t enough, I decided that if the lack of comments was weird then my e-mail slump may’ve been too. Thus I discovered that my kuriousity e-mail wasn’t working either! So after much testing, that’s fixed as well. Unfortunately I have no way of retrieving e-mails that may not have reached me, so if you’ve tried to contact me at my lissa@kuriousity.ca e-mail and recieved no response, there’s a good chance I never recieved it.

Hopefully that shall be the end of my communication woes and I can yet again be reachable. Sorry for any percieved rudeness of my behalf over the last while and I look forward to reading future e-mails and comments from my visitors without issue :)

Well, not exactly, but while doing some recent (and much needed) tidying up around here, I’ve also created a LiveJournal account specifically for my updates here at Kuriousity. I get a lot of hits from LJ, mostly from links and feeds from other sites who utilize LJ in this way, so with a good audience using the site, I thought it’d be a useful feature to get in on. So if you’re a LiveJournal user, and like following site updates through it, you can now use that handy little stripbutton on my side bar, or click right here, to go to Kuriousity on LJ. Shorter posts will be seen there in their entirety (some of you may even be reading it there now, hmm?) but longer articles and full reviews will remain exclusively posted here, with links on LJ leading you to their full versions.

Tidying-wise for the interested, my sidebar now looks much less cluttered with the archives smushed down into a handy little dropdown menu (it’s so beautiful…) and some new links have been added to the Blogroll. There’s also a banner link to Tina Anderson and MTCopyright’s webcomic, Whore of Turfan (updates every Friday! 18+ only) and a link to my Twitter account, for any who like my random ramblings enough to see them in frequent, tiny form.

And finally, though completely unrelated to my website in anyway, here’re a few fun links of the day:

Manga Recon Roundtable: Rescue Me!
AnimeVice: The Winter 2009 Preview!
New Manga Release List, Dec 17, 2008

Just a note to point out a few small changes around the website. I’m currently going through all my reviews and adding in links to Amazon.com purchase pages to go along with the Amazon.ca ones already present. A couple people had asked me about it so here you go! See, never hurts to ask ;) This is a bit of a project for me, with over 250+ pages to go through, but soon enough they’ll all be changed!

I’ve also finally set myself up a new e-mail address for my Kuriousity questions, submissions and inquiries. So, if you’d like to get a hold of me, then you can now drop me a line at lissa @ kuriousity.ca (removing the spaces). Those who’re already in contact with me now, feel free to keep using the same e-mail address for me you already have.

And finally, there’s a new bio picture up on the About page for Gizmo, a friend of mine who has graciously been helping me out with some review writing! Bio coming soon. Between her, Marsha and I, you’ll always have something new to read everyday here on Kuriousity!