You’ve read the subject correctly. For once I am updating the site in the middle of the day, rather than the middle of the night. You see, I’ve been doing anything I can to avoid working on my NaNo novel because it’s just so obvious I’m not going to win now.

What does this mean for all of you? It means a brand new look for the directory and a few little changes to how it’s viewed. You’ll notice that instead of using random symbols, I now have little pixels to label the sites for content and language. I really liked the blinkies I added to the “NEW” sites, so I decided to hunt down a few more little pixels I could use.

The most labor intensive part of that was labeling all of the non-English language sites. Each is labeled, to the best of my knowledge, with it a flag for its country of origin. The problem with this, of course, is that I couldn’t always be certain so I had to make an educated plus. Plus, some countries use multiple languages and some sites have multiple countries of origin. But I’ve done my best. You’ll notice that other countries which use English primarily — Great Britain, Canada, Australia, etc — have not been labeled. That was a choice I made to save myself work and because I felt it was really unnecessary.

But all of this work made me realize that I haven’t had a hit tracker on the site since I switched it over to WordPress. I wanted to get some statistics on where my visitors were coming from, so I decided to add one of those with this update. Until I have some information from that, you can view this list below to see where all of the non-English language sites in the directory are from.

Brazil — 40
Chile — 4
Costa Rica — 1
Czech Republic — 1
France — 1
Germany — 1
Mexico — 6
Peru — 1
Poland — 1
Spain — 2

Of course, these are just the sites that use a foreign language. I know of other Brazilian sites and sites from various European countries that are primarily in English. I will be double checking for those and labeling some of them, but for now, the directory updates are finished.

Isn’t it fascinating, though, to see all the places where hanfic authors come from?