Anime Night 5 this Saturday

June 18th, 2009

We’re be having another KAF Anime Night this Saturday, where we watch anime together! For more information…

Currently planned:

  1. K-ON ep. 1
  2. Gurren Lagann ep. 2
  3. FLCL ep. 2
  4. Sword of the Stranger (movie)
  5. Ikki Tousen ep. 1

New anime music track preview

June 18th, 2009

If you’re hard pressed to find which song in an album you are looking for, you can use our new “preview” function to listen to thirty-second samples of each song. If you’re looking to see if an album is worth your money, or you’re trying to find the name of a particular song, the preview should come quite in handy! Each clip starts at thirty seconds past the beginning, and each one lasts up to 30 seconds. Songs that are shorter than 30 seconds do not have a preview. Each sample is reduced in quality from the original too, so that they will load faster.

You also get to see a cool visualization, as long as you are not using Internet Explorer:

Track preview visualization

Track preview visualization

Preview links will appear to the right side of most tracks, but you need to be logged into the site for them to appear. In addition, you need to be logged in to listen to them, so you can’t just give them to friends at the moment.

The player is powered by Scott Schiller’s SoundManager 2 and 360-player.

Registration required for anime music

June 11th, 2009

We’ve flipped the switch. Now you need to register an account to download music from the site. However, you don’t have to post, rack up points, or do anything like that. Just register, login, and you have the same access that you always had. However, hopefully you also visit our forum and post a bit!

Explaining the recent downtime

April 29th, 2009

The website wasn’t available the other day because our domain registration for keiichianimeforever.com lapsed. There is someone responsible for renewing the registration, but he was a bit busy and it slipped his mind. Anyway, KAF should be up for most people now, and it’s probably up for you if you can read this.

New network bar at the top

April 28th, 2009

Our network bar is the little bar that is above most of the pages on KAF. For guests, it provides links to visit other sections of KAF and serves as a quick site map. For members, it also provides alerts about new messages and information on what other members are currently doing (like who is currently in the chat and who is playing certain multiplayer games). We have had the bar for a few years now, and it’s a really useful central messaging center.

To accommodate some significant issues with the design of the previous network bar, we have rolled out another one with a new look and a few new features. Non-members won’t notice much of a difference, but members will now notice that the bar displays a list of your friends that are online and the status of the TeamSpeak 2 server. Right now it doesn’t display a list of members playing Digital Paint: Paintball 2 anymore, but that is in the works.

The new network bar solved four problems that we had with the old one:

  • Because menus opened by hovering over the menu titles, the menus couldn’t have scrollbars (without being awkward to use) and consequently, long lists could not be put into the menus. Menus are now opened on the new network bar by clicking, and now more information can be cleanly put into the menus.
  • The network bar now supports tooltips, so now new members will know what the things on the bar actually mean. This was a feature that we wanted for a long time.
  • The old bar required only CSS to work, but this caused problems of its own. Sometimes the bar didn’t work correctly on some configurations.
  • Because the individual items on the network bar did not touch the bottom of the network bar, menus had to drop down from the middle of the bar and it was a bit odd from an aesthetic point of view.

Unfortunately, JavaScript is now absolutely required to use the bar. Perhaps we will make it somewhat degradable if you happen to have JavaScript off, but don’t have your hopes up too high. Getting a pure-CSS implementation of the menus to work wouldn’t be trivial.

By the way, the bar looks absolutely atrocious on IE 6, but it works. It looks best on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, because the three support rounded corners.

Yes, the bar looks quite Facebook-y. Originally it didn’t in Photoshop, but then we wanted to solve issue #4 (listed above), and so we had to do it this way (which we originally avoided with the previous iterations of the network bar). Getting the original design to work in code would have also generated much more CSS and JS, and we didn’t want to emulate that aspect of Facebook (bloat).

Don't send to KAF's email address

March 28th, 2009

It presently is not working. We will update you on when it works again.

[See the original post]

(Posted by sk89q)

Upcoming changes to the website

March 25th, 2009

We’ve been working on updating the website for a while now and we’re on the verge of releasing a new version of the website within the next week, complete with a new layout and rewritten pages. It’s not that major website upgrade that we had announced earlier, but it’s something. In terms of updates to the websites though, it has never been this much overhauled. Looking through the code for the website, you can see that a lot of stuff dates back to 2004.

However, as large as the update is, there’s nothing especially exciting in this release, but we’ve fixed up bugs here and there. Our track name cleanup algorithm (we get the name of each track from the file’s filename, but obviously the files are named differently) is now better, no longer corrupting the names of track entries that only have their track number. There should be less broken links with the anime music archive after this update as well. Some pages were removed because they no longer worked (notably the anime captioner).

Preview of the new website

Preview of the new website

The look of the website is still under some consideration. The sidebar feels like a bunch of things thrown together, as it does now on the current website. We are currently brainstorming what to do about that.

Before we can release the site, we need to re-integrate the search engine, create a useful front page, figure what to do with the sidebar, and update the “download” part of the anime OSTs to be in tune with the site’s new changes. We will also need to do some QA testing to make sure everything still works and and that it hasn’t gotten confusing to navigate.

On another note, we had a report of the Contribute-an-Album website having an issue with accepting uploads with the Java uploader. We plan to look into this within the coming days.

Revisiting the KAF manga reader

March 22nd, 2009

It appears that while we stopped updating our online manga reader (circa January 2005), the manga reader website is still online. Well, for the sake of revisiting some old times, here are some pages from the manga reader below.

The situation with the OSTs

March 9th, 2009

For the time being, the anime OSTs will be unavailable while we sort out some things. We can’t really say what exactly the problems are, but know that we should be back online in a week.

There’s some good news though. We just upgraded to a large bandwidth pipe, meaning that we can sustain more people downloading at any given time. Before, we had only a throughput of 10 mbits/sec, meaning that we could only transfer at most 1.25 megabytes per second. Because we didn’t throttle the speed of downloads, two people downloading at 500 kilobytes/sec could tie up most of the line, leaving little bandwidth for other people to use. With this fatter pipe, we will be able to serve not only more people, but a few things on the side for our members (game servers, etc.). Besides that, we are are now redundant via seven tier-1 network providers.

On the more technical side of things, we are planning to roll out server software dedicated to file transfer (RiceServ). Right now, downloads are handled through the website, but to anyone aware of the issues, this is highly inefficient. The file transfers will be conducted over FTP (file transfer protocol), which should be more reliable than the current situation. This is mostly a technical change, we’ll admit, and you will probably not notice too much of a difference. However, there will probably be less (or no more) file missing errors as a result.

On the progress of that update

February 26th, 2009

Okay, so we haven’t quite finished that version two as we were hoping to. In fact, it doesn’t look like we will be finishing this project anytime soon. However, all is not lost for our visitors quite yet. We may implement parts of the site gradually over time, even if we would have to write code to make the old and new stuff be friends. Unfortunately, all of us are busy with our own matters and no one really has the time to dedicate to the project. There are only two programmers too and we only have so many hours in a day.