BLOGGING TOOLS — FINDING THE SOURCE

Greetings! Today’s topic is not on a specific anime/manga but blogging itself! Although I have started blogging back in 2014, I’ve never blogged very seriously. By that, I mean sticking to a schedule or thinking about engagement or all that. I still don’t take some of those points seriously but it sure feels nice to think more on how to improve what I’m doing here, both in quality and efficiency. I still play around with the features of WordPress, and I’m concerned as to how the outcome looks so my posts occasionaly change formats. I’m sure it’s lots of trial, error and learning from others through sharing for all of us, and I’m glad I’ve came across very kind people in the blogosphere.

Don’t worry, I’m cutting to the chase. If you have ever laid eyes on my Twitter, it’s 80% fanart. Who doesn’t love them! So refreshing to see our beloved characters in different art styles or times and spaces. I love to add some fanarts in my posts like the other bloggers here. If it’s from Twitter, it’s easy to embed the links through blocks. You can just copy the link to the Twitter block and voila! This way, readers can track down the image source and discover a new artist through you ~

If you want to look at personal (or additional) illustrations of a certain mangaka you love, I just use Baka Updates website to see if the artist has a Pixiv account, which is a similar platform to DeviantArt. They almost always do! I frequently see big hype when a manga artist we love draws another artist’s characters. You can find crossovers like that on artists’ Pixiv accounts because they are free to upload whatever they want. If you find something that you love, embedding the link or giving it a source would, again, help others to go to the platform and show their love.

I also use Baka Updates to get an artist’s or series’ name in kana so that I can do my searches in Japanese.

These are all basics, I know. But don’t leave yet, as I’ve saved the best for last. It’s easy to include links if you already discovered the artist on the platforms they post. Then, what about Pinterest? Or Google Images? Especially on Pinterest, many of the images do not have any sources linked to them and it would be impossible to track it down unless it has a style you know by heart. Many artists have explained why just adding ‘credit to owner’ doesn’t let you off the hook many times, so I won’t go down that path. However, fret not! I present you:

SauceNAO is a reverse-image searching website that gives you the source of the art you’ve found on the internet. It works much better than reverse-searching on Google Images because SauceNAO searches the images primarily in platforms like Pixiv, DeviantArt, Twitter, Tumblr etc. Just a simple search gives you the info you need. This way, instead of hopping from one platform to another and search for fanart, you can just search on Google and track down the source here.

I think it’s important to spend that extra minute and give credit whenever you can, SauceNAO is a very helpful and user-friendly website when it comes to that. I was able to find results even if the original work was deleted from the account, I could still get information on the artist. Like I said, I’m not the most tech-savvy person out there and a newbie at blogging, However, if any of the tools I’m using can be of help to you, that would make me happy. I can’t promise any regular posting schedule for this section now, it’ll be more of a “I’ll write one when I come across something,” kind of thing.

As always, thank you for reading and see you next post!!