Happy 8th Birthday, DA!

DA! turns 8 years old today. It's rather a scary thought that I've had this site around for that long. It started when I was just entering college, and now I've already got a Masters degree and have been at my job at Google for over two years. Just crazy.
Anyway, as with previous birthdays, I celebrate by giving DA! a new layout. This year, I decided to go extremely over-the-top with Web 2.0 sensibilities (or insensibilities depending on your views.) This means shiny chrome, lots of soft gradients, and oodles of reflections everywhere. I was originally going to keep the rotating headers, but never found any other images that seemed to fit the header as well as the Kino no Tabi image that currently graces the top. I figured the slick 2.0-style UI was a nice about-face from the previous Zen, Chinese classical layout, of which I remain quite fond of (I almost wanted to keep it for another year, but decided that change was still good.)
I removed the resource section, since I hadn't updated it since two versions ago, and wasn't really planning to ever do so. I replaced it with a local syndication of this blog, mostly because one of the things I've learned to do at work is syndicate Blogger feeds in all sorts of static HTML files. I've always wanted to integrate the blog more into the look and feel of the website, and with Blogger feeds this is really easy. Of course you can still view the blog on Blog*Spot if you feel so inclined. This ensures that all sections of the site remain fresh and interesting.
Well, I'm off to another day at Fanime con. Hopefully I'll finish my next wall in a few days, but as you can see, I was a bit busy with this redesign.

7 year retrospective

It's official: DA! Desktop Anime is now 7 years old. That's a scary thought. I mean, this website's old enough to hit the second grade! How many websites run by a single person on their spare time do you know of that's been updated monthly for seven years?
This site is older than Wikipedia. It's even older, by a few months, than that other "DA" site, DeviantArt.
What a wild ride it's been. When I started this site I had just begun my first year of undergrad. Netscape was a cool browser. We had just learned there was something called "CSS" that was supposed to get rid of those <font> tags for once and for all. I really, really liked Fushigi Yuugi and Pretear.
Now, I've got my Master's degree and a lovely job at Google, Netscape has disappeared almost entirely into a footnote in history of the Mozilla project. New buzzwords like AJAX and RSS are making the rounds. I have almost completely stopped watching any anime series, except for a rare few (Nodame Cantabile and Mushishi, namely.)
But don't start getting up! The captain has NOT turned off the seatbelt sign. I don't plan on stopping any time soon, so you'd better hang on because I'm toasting to another seven years of hearty wallpaper goodness.
Because some time ago (it's been long enough that I stopped counting the time gone by) I made it a tradition to grace DA! with a new layout once a year on its birthday. So here you go. Enjoy the Zen goodness of version 9, which includes a lot more ways of finding wallpapers. I dumped the ratings, which never felt like they were doing anything for the site, and added links to the wallpapers on Minitokyo and AnimePaper. I also added all the widescreen versions of walls I made this past year. Because dammit, widescreen is wiiiiiiiiide. And very, very good.

Happy Birthday, my dear little website.