A second update of the AniBroad project is well needed. To tell you the truth, I’ve written this a few months back, but I wasn’t ready to say anything, after making a vow to not give an exact say of when X will happen and I need Y to do it. I’ve titled this “AniBroad Update #2.5″, though there isn’t a #2 post. That’s because this is really #2, but taking so long before I actually published this, I added more information to it–with the exception of the striked texts, which is no longer the case after months of debating.

With this post I bring great news of the project, and I will finally reveal of what AniBroad will do for those that want to promote their content and those that want something different from what they traditionally read. For those that have been interested and have waited patiently for this project (and thank you for waiting this long!), you will be pleased to know of the progress made. ^_^

AniBroad: The Social Bookmarking Site

Thanks to the power of Ruby on Rails programming and a year’s contemplation, AniBroad will be re-launched as an social bookmarking site. There are many social bookmarking sites for everything else on Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Anything Goes… but not for Anime.

There are very few out there for Anime, Otaku, and Japanese culture as a whole: with Japan Bump currently the top aggregator for the Japan blogging community. JapanSoc and BlogLinkJapan–a Japan blog feed aggregator–are currently under going restructuring and have switched to the Facebook page format for the time being. Besides my favorite Otaku.fm, there aren’t many others that look… how should I say it… exciting?

Instead of running a Pligg site, I decided to write such a site from scratch. The experience of writing it was very difficult at first; the more I learned about Ruby on Rails, the less difficult it was.

The Directory?

When I talked about AniBroad in 2010, it was originally going to be a directory site, with the intention to add a feed aggregator feature. The stand-alone directory will return at a later time as the site grows. As for an aggregator… eventually. I would really, really like the option of submitting a blog feed to automate promotion of one’s blog. During my idling over the project, I found out that a number of people would have to be interested in this, because of Heroku.

I learned about Heroku following the Rails Tutorial series. It’s really a good site for new and seasoned developers for testing and running Rails apps right away without extra server configuring. You can get an account for free; serious developers would need to shell out money enough to buy a Playstation Vita or two–with 3G–for “advanced” databases for heavy traffic sites (for advanced devs, anyway). If I use Heroku now, it would cost $0 to host AniBroad, but additional resources would cost me at least $10 a month (in addition to paying for this blog) for hourly cron jobs…

In other words: daily cron jobs would be totally affordable at $0 if users are willing to wait for their posts to show up. Or I could just use a better service to host both this blog and AniBroad without hearing excuses why Rails 3 can’t be used until, oh, let’s say Rails 4.

(Good News! After moving to DreamHost this past December, I have some freedom since Rails 3 is supported, and I should be able to use cron without limitations.)

Delayed Development

After implementing the important features, I felt like I was pushing myself too hard after pulling my hair at the errors I encountered, even finding the remedy on Google didn’t help much. This was from installing an administration backend so I could launch AniBroad sooner. Patience is the key in this to launch the site in the way it should operate. I had not worked on AniBroad in almost two months back in the late of Summer, thanks to everything else adding the preparations of two conventions. Actually, with everything implemented so far, I could launch it right now, but it needs to make sense to me and the user(s).

To break it down: AniBroad is 97% complete and ready for launch very, very soon. I can seriously launch it right now, but there are a few things that I’m unsure of that could go wrong during use. If everything is going according to plan, expect something by the end of January.

If you’re just joining in, read the first AniBroad Update to get up to speed.