Anime

Blogger Recognition Award Winter 2020!

Introduction

I’ve been fortunate enough to be nominated for the Blogger Recognition Award! That’s a pleasant thing to find in one’s WordPress Comments!

As with most of these awards or tags, there are some rules. They are:

  1. Thank the nominator (a nominator is like a Terminator, but with fewer lethal results)
  2. Give the story of my blog (I think the requirement that the story should be interesting is implied; TBH, I’m a bit apprehensive…)
  3. Give two or more pieces of advice to new bloggers
  4. Nominate 10 others bloggers

Thanking the Nominator

I would like to thank the following bloggers for nominating me:

  1. 9 Tailed Kitsune
  2. Never Argue with a Fish
  3. Tiger Anime

Now, because they nominated me, you might question these fine sites. But having read all three sites for some time, I can (and do!) attest that they produce posts that are fun, informative, and thought-provoking. So please do visit their sites — don’t hold this nomination against them!

The Story of Crow’s World of Anime

I mean, it’s Gate. What’s not to like? How could I not want to talk about it — and shows like it? Capture from the Crunchyroll stream.

I’ve talked in a previous post about how I wanted to use this site to make a place where fans of any kind of anime could relax and talk about their series — without concern of being judged or harmed. I’ve talked about how I wanted to create a site where we could celebrate anime. I’ve also talked about how I try to use this site to make the world a tiny bit better.

But I’ve not gone into a lot of detail about how the site came to be. And there’s a very good reason for that.

It’s really pedestrian.

I love writing. I love science fiction. Years ago, one of my favorite series, Farscape, had ended. Okay, it had been prematurely cancelled. Same with Stargate: SG1. And Stargate: Atlantis. Detecting a pattern, I started looking into other forms of entertainment. In my post about Why I Love Anime, I mentioned that I’d been aware of anime for some time, and I had found series like Gate. And I wanted to talk about it.

I’d had blogs before (like the blog that’s evolved to be my application security blog), so creating WordPress sites was the easy part. I thought about what to call the site, because I wanted the subject matter to be clear, but I wanted it to be distinctive and easy to remember. You can read how I came up with the name in this Sunshine Blogger Award post. The short version? Crow’s World of Anime had the same cadence as Wheel of Fish.

It made sense at the time.

Advice for New Bloggers

This is a big question, isn’t it? It’s important, too. One of the things I like about the ani-blogging community is that it really is a community. So, I like opportunities to share what I’ve learned.

You know, we really should capture the answers of all the bloggers who got received this tag. We could create an ani-blogging advice site. That’d be kinda cool!

Anyway, here’s my advice.

Take Security Seriously

Please do take security seriously. I really don’t want to see your hard work ruined.

As a computer security professional, I’d get laughed out of the profession if I didn’t start any advice about hosting a blog with a plea to take security seriously. You can spend years building up your inventory of posts. You can spend countless hours building your reputation. And it can all go down the drain in a matter of moments if a malicious actor takes over your site.

And that happens way too often.

I’ve put together a series of posts to share some easy to implement ideas to keep your site secure. Seriously, it’s a small investment, and the payoff is huge.

Take Yourself Seriously

Express yourself. Please don’t try to copy someone else. The sites that stick out in my mind are the ones where a unique perspective comes through. Take a look at 100 Word Anime, I Drink and Watch Anime, Mechanical Anime Reviews, Never Argue with a Fish, The Otaku Author, Shallow Dives in Anime, and many other sites — including the Nominators!

Even without reading anything, at a glance, you know it’s their site. And when you start reading? It’s like greeting an old friend.

The world doesn’t need a new site out to just generate clicks. There are a lot of techniques to get you short-term traffic. But there’s only one way to generate long-term engagement. There’s only one way to build your brand in such a way that people will trust you and want to read your stuff — for the right reasons.

That one way: Develop your authentic voice and let it loose on the world.

That’s the kind of thing that makes the world a better place.

Skills Take Time

Approach your craft with the same intensity as Plug Cryostatbut with the intelligence of Arrester Blanket. Don’t mix them up! Maid outfit is optional. Capture from the Crunchyroll stream.

Saying “develop your authentic voice” sounds so stirring, doesn’t it? And I think it is. But I don’t want to set false expectations. It can take time — sometimes a lot of time — if you haven’t been writing for awhile. I almost feel like I cheated. When I started my blog, I was already old enough to have several decades of writing behind me. I’d been a professional writer for years. I knew how I sounded. At least, I knew how I sounded in different fields.

What I hadn’t been is an anime blogger. If you compare my early posts to my more recent work five and a half (or so) years ago (and heaven help you if you’re brave enough to try!), you’ll see that my focus is now almost completely on wonderful moments in anime. Not general reviews; you can get great reviews in a number of places. Not critical or vicious reviews; you can find tons of those, too. But I wanted to celebrate amazing moments in anime, and it took me a while to figure out how to do it. And I’m sure it’ll evolve over time!

Give yourself the time to find your voice and how best to express it. Don’t put pressure on yourself to rush. We’ll wait!

Nominations

This is going to be tough. I know the bloggers I’d like to nominate, and I think I know who’s otherwise been nominated, but I’m not sure. So, apologies if you get multiples!

Of course, if you’re not inclined, or don’t have time, no worries!

Thanks for reading!

tcrow
Copyright 2022 Terrance A. Crow. All rights reserved.
https://www.crowsworldofanime.com

31 thoughts on “Blogger Recognition Award Winter 2020!

  1. Thank you for the tag and congratulations for getting the recognition you deserve!

    Now i should check out those security tips cause the only thing i do these days is regularly update things but surely there is more i can do than just that

    1. Thanks!

      As far as security goes, if you only pick one thing, then regular updates is it! Well, that and not downloading illegal plugins!

      If you do invest the time in reading my other security posts, I hope you find them useful!

      1. Also i do have a backup plugin that does it every two weeks and then apparantly sends a confirmation to my email but i dont receive anything like that for some reason…

        Thanks in advance for those

        1. That’s a great idea! It’d be terrible if an outage destroyed your work!

          If you’re not receiving the e-mail, you might want to double check that the backups are running.

          I’m so paranoid that not only does Jetpack backup my site, I run a file system backup and a MySQL backup every month.

  2. Congrats on your reward.

    The funny thing is that I started a personal blog back when I was in freshman year in college (2009). Of course, this personal blog does not exist anymore, but the blogosphere is a lot different back then with it being more active than becoming a niche these days.

    Of course, I understand the security stuff. I am in the IT field too (I have a Masters Degree in IT Administration and Security), but in the federal government (Navy for 1 year and will be starting in the Department of Treasury soon next month). Despite having a gap year, I only have a Comptia Security Plus (from my old job) and a Cyber Security Analyst certification. It’s still a long way until I can even get a CISSP since I still need 4 years from what I heard. Also, I would rather have my employer pay for it when I need it, although my work between the two jobs are only in Data Management.

    1. Thanks!

      If you have that much experience, it might not be as hard to earn your CISSP as you think. Yes, it’s the most difficult test I’ve ever taken, and that includes the tests as diverse as the OS/2 Certified Engineer exam and the NASD Series 6 exam. But if you know your stuff, and experience does count, then you might just need to take a course.

      I found the course helpful to show me how ISC2 approached security. When I started software development back in the mid 1980s, things were much different, so a lot of what I know I learned by living through it. Once I went through the CISSP class to get my dead around its taxonomy, and once I fleshed out some of the topics I didn’t have a lot of personal experience with, I was good to go.

      Very good idea to have your employer pay for it! Those classes and exam can really add up!

  3. This post alone shows exactly why you’re so deserving of recognition haha. Very good advice, I never even considered security. I’ll be sure to remember these things as I continue blogging! Cheers for the post

  4. Good advice!

    I’m a big fan of Farscape and Stargate (SG-1 is one of my favourite Sci-fi series of all time, next to Doctor Who). I’ve actually just started a rewatch of SG-1 from the very beginning, so far I’m up to Hathor, which I have conflicting feelings about.

    Your blog is a wonderful little haven and thank you for being here.

    1. Thanks!

      Oh, yeah, I remember Hathor! I also remember feeling squirmy during that episode. I might have to rewatch the series, too…

      And thanks for the compliment! Much appreciated!

    1. Thanks!

      It’s amazing to me how little most companies (and people) think about security — until it’s too late!

      And then it’s, well, too late…

      I didn’t plan that sentence well, did I?

  5. Some good advice as always. I was particularly interested in the part about compiling all the advice. That would be a pretty useful resource. Maybe as an ebook? I’d be happy to put my experience putting together ebooks to help with that. Especially if we put out into the world for free.

    1. Thanks!

      I’ll keep your offer in mind! Offering a free e-book to ani-bloggers sounds like a good way to support the community!

      I’ve use Scrivener to produce an e-book, but I strongly suspect there’s more to it than that!

      I’ll give it some more thought…

      1. It’s possible to set it up so that it’s free on channels like Amazon so we could certainly make it widely available. Plus other ebook distributors too. Would be a pretty cool community project.

  6. Congrats on the award! 😊 That’s some great advice you gave. We don’t normally think about security but it sure is important.

  7. First congratulations and of course you wanted to create a fun an welcoming refuge for fans. It’s so obvious in everything you write but it was still so sweet to read it.

    And i appreciate the mention as always

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