Category: blogging

Redesign Done

Kurn / / blogging

Okay, so the redesign is more or less done! I currently have no links to other blogs posted, but that’s more a function of the fact that my links section was woefully outdated, so I’ll take some time and fix that up and get them up soon.

The polls should work, but the poll archive link will not go away no matter what I try to do. Which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if there was actually an archive to link to.

As to the small google ad over there, I’m already blocking uncool sites, but over the next week or so, please do copy the URL (don’t click on the ad! Right-click, copy link address!) and use this form to help me block more evil advertisers. That is available up at the “Bad Ads” link in the top right and the link directly below the ad itself. You shouldn’t see too many questionable ads of other sorts, though, since I was able to filter them at a category level. Sadly, gold-selling ads, etc, fall under “video games”, and it doesn’t make sense to block that category on a site that is, you know, dedicated to a video game. ;)

Anyways, if you see anything else that’s broken or looks icky, please do let me know!

ETA: Some display issues in Chrome that I may or may not work on at some point. Also, the ads are now starting to show spiritual healing ads. Ahahahaha.

ETA Again: Fixed the Chrome issue. It was displaying the page’s title as text on the page, offsetting the entire header. I moved the wowhead script below the title tag in the code, et voila.

Potential Downtime and Redesign

Kurn / / blogging

Since I’m not sure exactly what percentage of my readers actually visit the site (averaging about 100 visits a day) and what percentage read from an RSS reader (no idea what this number would be like), I’m not sure if you’ve noticed that my blog site here has become extremely cluttered. It’s not unlike my real-life spaces, to be honest! I guess I carry my clutter everywhere with me. ;)

My front page has my twitter feed, random polls I put up from time to time, achievement feeds, category links, links to other blogs, armory links, all kinds of stuff. It’s feeling a little much and it certainly could be organized better. So, at some point in the next week or so, expect the layout to change significantly. Expect me to break something at some point. Expect the blog to be inaccessible sometime. I’m not sure anything will break, nor am I sure it’ll be inaccessible, but whenever I’m confident that I won’t break something, I do. :P

I’m also planning on putting in some code for some Google text ads, primarily to help defray hosting costs, but also because I’m interested in building up the site a bit more and if I’m going to put in more energy than I currently do, I’d kind of like to see if I can get any returns on it. I rather suspect that advertising on a personal kind of blog is kind of frowned upon in the blogging community, because I don’t see a lot of it. That said, I thought I’d throw in some very simple advertisements while doing the redesign and if my traffic drops substantially because of it, I’ll remove it. My overall goal is to share information about World of Warcraft from a variety of perspectives (but obviously the Holy Paladin perspective tends to be the main one these days) and to share my raiding experiences. That does include random daily frustrations, annoyances and the like, but also the awesomeness of progression. When we get LK heroic down on 25-man, I’ll be posting about it, that’s for sure. I plan to write about Ruby Sanctum. I plan to write about Cataclysm.

I plan to write about a lot of things and for quite some time, so if advertisements will prevent a significant amount of people from coming here and reading all the stuff I’ve written or plan to write, I’ll drop them from the site.

In the month of April, I had 4532 pageviews from 2729 visits, for an average of 1.66 pages per visit. Average time on site was 2m22s. So we’ll see if any of that drops for June or so, eh?

Anyways, thanks to everyone for reading and I hope you’ll be reading for quite some time. :)

Beta Beta Bo-Beta…

Kurn / / achievements, apotheosis, beta, blogging, cataclysm, lfg, ramblings

As I wait in the interminable Bloodlust (Alliance) queue for a dungeon, waiting for someone to need a level 68 healer, I thought I’d drop in my two cents about the upcoming Cataclysm Beta.

I got into the Wrath beta, thanks to my RL friend the resto druid. She had a spare beta key that she gave me and I spent much of my time screenshotting things, getting my hunter to 73, laughing my ass off when Unholy Blight would crash world servers and generally exploring things. I remember when Infusion of Light would cause an instant HOLY LIGHT, not just a Flash of Light. I remember when there was only a 25% penalty to healing when using Divine Plea, not a 50% one.

I really enjoyed my time in Beta. I got to see half-finished mobs in Dragonblight, I got to experience quests before others. You know the quest for Nexus called Quickening? You kill the big ol’ tree things in the zone and get Arcane Splinters. In Beta? They weren’t group loot. There were like, 10 of them available total or something. I wrote feedback, recommending group loot or 25 total so that all five people could get their quest items if all five people were on the quest. Guess what? That’s what happens on live. :D

I also really enjoy just learning the new mechanics before things go live. One thing I hate about expansions is that it’s a near-total knowledge reset. By the end of Burning Crusade, I could have tanked on a warrior at 70, even though my own warrior is only level 16. I had done my research. I could have played just about any spec of any class adequately throughout any encounter from Kara to BT. I might not have topped damage meters or healing meters or been able to hold aggro from our resident fury warrior while I was tanking, but I knew enough about what abilities were available to everyone and when they should use them that I could have done an okay job.

Come Wrath, most of that knowledge was gone.

“Vigilance?” I remember asking, “What the hell is that?”

It typically takes me at least a full year to be relatively acclimated to the game changes an expansion brings. Beta knocks off a bit of that time and lets me learn about my own classes right off the bat so that I have the knowledge that’s most important to me already subsumed by the time live hits. When live hits, it’s about learning about other classes, newer quests and instances I never tried on beta and such.

I’m hoping I get into Cataclysm’s beta early on so that I can learn about some of the big changes — guilds, mastery, archeology and the like — as well as my own classes so that when Cataclysm comes out, I am ready to hit the ground running.

I really do want to restart my dear old Apotheosis (most of the time, anyways!) and the best way for me to do that is to go into 4.0 filled to the brim with knowledge about how things work in Cataclysm.

The thought of going forth into the beta and the next expansion really reminds me, too, that a lot of the content I post here, the informative stuff, is technically time-sensitive. My Holy How-Tos are going to be all but useless come the expansion. Definitely something to bear in mind, going forward. Every patch, every expansion, things will probably change, which is something I haven’t had to deal with since I only REALLY started blogging in earnest after 3.3 hit, despite the fact I started this blog up around 2.4!

Anyways, should I get into the beta, I WILL be posting stuff here. I’ll put it all behind the cut, though, and my blog subjects will be not-too-spoilery. :) This is your notice!

The queue still hasn’t popped. In other news, I got Portal Jockey and I’m on a Boat last night!

… yeah, that’s about it for now, I guess. This queue is awful. I think I’ll try my hand at some AV.

In lieu of two posts I want to make…

Kurn / / blogging, ramblings

… I joined Twitter.

Which is kind of silly, ’cause I have a “RL” twitter account I don’t really use and another one that I used for quite some time and then a more professional one… and now a WoW one.

I can only imagine my “RL” twitter followers will be relieved to see a distinct lack of WoW tweets from now on, though. ;)

So I’m @kurnmogh over on twitter. Already have connected with someone who had actually apped to Apotheosis back in the day when we were searching desperately for an ele shammy. Kind of a crazy-small world we all live in!

The two posts I want to make will be coming up this week:

1) Spells, downranking and RankWatch.

2) Courtesy and etiquette regarding asking someone to pug a raid with you. (ie: How NOT to piss Kurn the hell off when randomly approaching her in Dalaran, which people apparently don’t know how to do so I’ve turned off my Kingslayer title, you cretins!)

Many thanks to Rilgon, a fellow hunter who feels strongly about his WoW.com representative in a similar way that I do, for talking a bit about Twitter in our recent mails and thereby (perhaps unknowingly) encouraging me to branch out into that brand of social media.

Cool!

Kurn / / blogging, dungeons, lfg, ramblings

Cassandri over at Hots & Dots wrote up a sweet guide to BRD – Prison if you, like many old-school players, know there has to be more to the prison than killing the interogator lady.

As an aside, I’m about 90% sure that the tank and healer combo she refers to in the post consists of my brother (prot pally) and me (disc priest), since we’re on the same battlegroup which makes it possible. Which is just uber coolness in and of itself. My brother was adorably pleased at even the possibility that someone thought he was a rockin’ tank in BRD. What tipped me off was the bit about how they patiently explained how not to aggro the entire damn bar.

Yeah, if that’s not me, I want to meet that person, who was likely the person in charge of attuning their ENTIRE GUILD to MC and Onyxia. The way I was. Curse you, Jailbreak!

(You know, it’s odd. I hated Reginald Windsor. With a passion. But I rescued his stupid ass over 25 times for various groups. Including twice for my friend Majik for reasons that have to do with him being a failure. ;) And now that I can’t rescue him, I find I miss him and the entire Onyxia storyline. Call me crazy, but I always looked forward to Dragonkin Menace, the Burning Steppes quest that started the whole quest chain.)

Geez.

Kurn / / blogging, facepalm, ramblings

I’m more than a little glad as to how I set up comments, in that the poster has to have an approved comment before comments get posted without being moderated first.

Why?

SO MUCH SPAM. In the last two or three weeks, I’m getting 5+ spam comments a day on a variety of posts. Sure, that’s nothing for most people, probably, but it’s driving me batty. At least it’s all being captured in the moderation queue and much of it is automatically marked spam by some of the options I’ve got here in WordPress, but good grief. All kinds of spam, gold sellers, levelling guides, all that stuff.

Pro tip: Do not tell me that my blog is a thing of beauty when the post you commented on was essentially me bitching about stuff.

Seriously, the latest:

“I usually don’t post in Blogs but your blog forced me to, amazing work.. beautiful …”

Naturally, all these commenters have URLs linked to their names to promote their skeevy websites, which is an additional tip-off. :P

Fellow bloggers, how do you deal with spam?

Just as an FYI…

Kurn / / blogging, facepalm, ramblings

Yes, I know tomorrow is April Fool’s.

No, I will not be writing any kind of jokey post. And no, I promise, this post is not an April Fool’s post, either.

No, I will not comment on the silly people who believe whatever it is Blizzard will put up this year (although, let me tell you, I totally bought into the BT attunement for a good five minutes, until I finished reading it all, by which point I was doubled over in laughter).

Basically, this post is to let you know that there’s going to be a LOT of misinformation across the board popping up, starting today and probably going through ’till Hawaii goes through the last hour of April 1. Don’t believe anything you read, from people quitting blogging or guilds merging or anything of the sort.

So, if it’s okay with you, I’ll just go sit over here and shake my head at all the gullible people believing stuff over the next day or so and stay out of the fray of insanity. Instead, I’ll just freak out about the fact that we’re going to be doing ICC25 hard modes and wondering what I ever did to Blizzard that deserves me getting to deal with Malleable Goo on Festergut and Vile Gas on Rotface in heroic modes.

Ideas and Conversations (and an unexpected development)

Kurn / / blogging, paladins

I originally started this blog because, well, I have things to say, darn it! :) My earliest posts are about professions, BC raiding, levelling a priest and the like. Scattered through the next few months were posts about Wrath’s beta, the launch of Wrath, the trials and tribulations of my own guild and my subsequent departure from Eldre’Thalas, my move to Bronzebeard and eventually to where I’m at now.

It was only while I was on Bronzebeard, freed of the Raid Leader/Guild Leader titles, that I felt I could devote any time whatsoever to blogging. It was only in December, with the advent of Patch 3.3 (and the LFG tool) that I really started being remotely prolific over on this little blog o’ mine. It was in December that I wrote my guides on how to be a tank, healer or DPS in dungeons, along with my Halls of Reflection guide. All these were inspired, of course, by the huge amounts of fail I witnessed in my random groups. These guides were linked over at TenTonHammer after I contacted Xerin about their existence. He’d previously contacted me about cross-promotion and such (which made me laugh, because I was convinced I had no readers) so I mailed him, he posted the link at TenTonHammer and I still gets hits from there even four months later.

Throughout all this, I’ve never really considered myself part of the “blogging community”. I’m a fairly opinionated individual who loves to express ideas through writing. More, I have a lot of stupid knowledge about this game which is obscure enough that I don’t think it would ever even come in handy on Jeopardy! like most other obscure bits of knowledge. So, whenever I encounter fail (or, much less frequently, win!) and feel like that could have been averted, if only someone had freaking read up on the encounter/etc, I tend to write something about it. My primary purpose here is to write about my frustrations and take steps to ensure I have no frustrations by virtue of writing what are hopefully informative posts about X, Y and Z that annoyed the crap out of me that day.

I also write to document my own experiences. I also obviously use my blog as a form of stress relief by discussing guild happenings while obfuscating people’s names and such as much as possible.

So, it’s kind of weird and confusing to me that, in February, I suppose that I stirred up a wee bit of controversy… I am, of course, referring to my epic-length posts about Chase Christian, the WoW.com holy paladin blogger.

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