How Terribly Clumsy of me…

by

Sometimes it just goes to show that no matter how much time, effort, and preparation you undertake in a task there is always something wrong that happens. I spent the past month and a half working on a new design and a layout. It’s what I do when I’m not raiding or farming.

I just finished transferring the files from my beta subdomain and it is now officially live. But I’m a little disappointed because some things don’t seem to work the way I want it to. Instead of the new layout being polished, it’s a little rough around the edges.

Changes

So what have I done to my blog exactly? I’ve made it look simpler and complicated at the same time. The design and look has a lot more white space. There isn’t as much clutter or noise. It’s also more complicated in the fact that I’ve stepped up some functionality.

Front Page

Hey! Where did the blog on the front page go? It went here. The front page is now static instead of having new posts dynamically changing. The front page now contains my favourite articles on the right and a listing of recent posts or pages on the left. Those of you with RSS readers (Google reader, even) will be unaffected.

Blogroll and links

I have way too many links on my blogroll. The stupid Google Reader export plugin doesn’t want to cooperate. My plan B? I installed an addon that harvested every link on my blog and displays it neatly on a new links page. I’m going to start getting in the habit of posting new blogs that I run into or posts that drill a point.

Article Selection

For the moment, I’ve put my favourite Priest and Raid Officer columns up as links on the front page. You can click on the tabs to choose between the two topics. I plan on adding more later. The articles there are what I consider the best I have to offer on those subjects.

Advertising

They aren’t really ads per se. Those are just affiliate banners of companies that I’m presently using. I wouldn’t recommend them if I didn’t like them. If you want a more detailed explanation on why I’m running affiliate banners and information on the companies themselves, please read more about my recommendations.

Categories

I’ve cut my categories in half. I’m going to axe some more tomorrow. Right now as it stands, there’s a lot of categories that had 1 or 2 posts in them. My intention is to combine them all in to broader categories. This is one of the fatal errors that I’ve made in my blog. I didn’t give proper thought to the kind of topics that I would cover. Now I’m stuck with having to go through all my old posts and editing what category they belong under.

Archives

I think I’m going to do away with chronological archives altogether. I don’t know if anyones ever used them. I suspect that you, as a reader, would be more inclined to browse through my older topics via topic or category instead of month.

About Page

Updated the about page with a better picture of myself, a description of me, and what this blog is about.

Contact Matticus

Created a new contact page which offers multiple methods for you to contact me including a spiffy email form (because Outlook takes forever to load, right?). I don’t mind emails. In fact, I encourage them! Sometimes I’ll even post up a few on the blog here to help answer some questions.

I’m just getting warmed up. This is my new look for the new year. Let me know if something breaks or is non-existent or gets pointed in the wrong direction.

It’s 3 AM. I’m going to bed. I have this feeling when I wake up I’m going to get a dozen or so comments either a) liking the new look b) hating it c) finding some error. I look forward to it (after precious sleep).

Setting Up Dual Ventrilos, What’s Your Client?

by

I say this every year on January 1st and this year is no exception.

I will never drink again.

But anyway, yesterday afternoon I was in Karazhan again with several friends (and that one random hunter pickup) and my Guild leader popped down into my Ventrilo channel to ask me if I was talking to myself. I guess from his perspective it looked like I was, but in actual fact I had two separate clients set up: 1 for my guild and 1 for a different guild. It’s not a trick that’s well known, but here’s how it can be done.

1: Right click on the shortcut to your Ventrilo
2: Click Properties
3: In the Target field, add -m to the end of the line

Now you can be connected to multiple vent servers simultaneously. If you’re going to do this, I strongly advise setting up different user profiles. Do that, then you can separate different keybinds for each user. Otherwise, what will end up happening is that pressing your transmit key will see you talking on all servers your connected on.

Then people will get strange ideas such as you talking to yourself.

I also know that teamspeak is a fairly popular voice client that some Guilds use. But I’ve never ran into anyone on Ner’Zuhl asking for people to use it. It’s always been vent. I’m interested to know if you use any 3rd party voice communication at all and if so which ones and why?

What third party voice client do you use?

  • Ventrilo (76%, 82 Votes)
  • Teamspeak (18%, 19 Votes)
  • Skype (6%, 6 Votes)
  • I don't use any (1%, 1 Votes)

Total Voters: 108

Loading ... Loading ...

This is My Last Post

by

… of 2007.

Tomorrow I will be out and about celebrating and counting down to New Year and all that fun stuff! I’m going to use what little time I have left today and tomorrow to finish up my new layout. It’s going to be simpler yet more functional. I hate coding. I transferred out of this profession years ago and having to modify this theme extensively for the past two months has reminded me why.

With a New Year comes new resolutions! Much like Honors Code who recently published his goals, here’s my list of things to do for 2008.

World of Warcraft

Mallet

* Kill Illidan
* Kill Zul’Jin
* Obtain Epic Flying Mount
* Break the base 2000 +healing mark
* Break the 300 MP5 while casting with full buffs mark

Saphfira

* Obtain 5/5 Vengeful Gladiator’s set (Elemental)
* Finish out Vindicator’s pieces (Ring, Belt, Boots)
* Level fishing to 375
* Improve myself more in PvP

Valoray

* Acquire Thunder
* Become viable in PvE as retribution (pigs might as well fly)
* Acquire a Flying Mount
* Become keyed for Karazhan
* Level blacksmithing to 375
* Become elixir specced
* Get reputation with Sporregar so I can transmute these useless Primal Earths to Waters

Personal

Blogging

* Start and finish out example healing assignments in Mag/TK/SSC
* Write less, but frequent
* Write more, but less often
* Continue pushing myself to deliver quality, timeless references

Academic

* Studying smarter, not harder
* Studying instead of raiding
* Not suck

Those are my resolutions. What’s yours? I will see you all in 2008!

Have a Happy (and safe) New Year!

Shadow Priests! Help!

by

I got a question from a guildmate who is a Priest of the… shadowy variety. Dealing damage and melting face is not my forte, so I’m hoping someone out there can help. I checked out Fate and Trollin’ as I know they’re both shadow but I couldn’t find their emails to contact them. So alas, I will post an open question on my world.

It’s a question of gear:

[item]Battlecast Hood[/item]
– OR –
[item]Uni-Mind Headdress[/item]

The Battlecast Hood has 2 gems on it: +6 Spell Damage and +5 Spell Penetration / +5 Spell Critical Rating and +5 Spell Penetration.

Let’s assume that there are head enchants on both of them (+22 Spellpower and +14 Spell Hit rating).

I have no idea what to look for in Shadow Priest gear. All I know is crit isn’t valued as highly. Help!

No One Else’s Fault But My Own

by

Masters Leiandra and and Trollin’ have asked the one question that sits in the back of our minds ever since we started playing this game.

Why are you playing this game? What made you get into this game? Who did it?

For me the answer is very easy but lengthy to answer. My first real game was Gizmos and Gadgets. Then I graduated to RTS’s with Warcraft 2. I loved the fantasy universe and I knew I would continue to play Warcraft games for a long time. Fast forward a few years and I met up with some people online in IRC (who happened to be local in my area). They asked me to play and compete with them in Counter-strike (1.5 was the norm back in the day). From that day onwards, we formed our own gaming clique. Whatever the current ‘fad’ in video games was, all of us would participate.

It started with CS
Then we moved to DoD
Warcraft 3 debuted and most of us played that
Back to CS: Source
DoTA
Lineage II Open Beta
Guild Wars
Then World of Warcraft hit

At first I resisted for several long months. I had a good excuse. I was just a poor high school student with no source of income. That summer I got a job and made a decent pile for a student. I decided to give WoW a try and I was hooked immediately. Several months later, most of us split due to some stupid issues. It was all my fault because I failed to heal one of my friends in STV and abandoned the field of battle because I didn’t want to participate in PvP anymore. I killed my subscription for a while and stopped playing. I stopped coming around on vent because I felt I didn’t deserve the flak I took for saving myself in a hopeless cause. It’s a little difficult to engage in combat as Holy and while I would perform well in PvE environments, I wouldn’t have a clue as to what to do in PvP. I didn’t really know anyone else to play with and it just wasn’t enjoyable without friends. I started nodding off when I did some quests or other things by myself. I got bored of the game, essentially.

Anyways, I started playing the game again because the same guys wanted to form a reroll raiding Guild. I figured why not? I’ve never truly seen the end of the game and I wanted to see what it was like. I picked a Priest to symbolize my dedication and goals: I picked, at the time, the class that was most in demand and underplayed (Dwarf Priests). You know what was stupid? Completely randoming his look. Sheesh, now I’m stuck with a scowl and a glare for the rest of my WoW career.

What I want to say is the only reason I’m playing this game isn’t for the raiding. I’m not here to get all the best loot as possible. I don’t care about progression and epics and the like. I’m not interested in showing my dominance and prowess in PvP. Some people take pride in pressing buttons faster and more accurate than the next guy. I lost that drive after Guild Wars.

Digression: We worked our asses off in Guild Wars to take the Hall of Heroes and get our damn sigil. Then we stopped playing after that.

Anyway, without caring about loot or PvP abilities, what does that leave?

Why then do I continue playing this game?

Because all of my friends are playing it. Truth be told, if my friends all stopped playing WoW, I would stop playing altogether. A lot of people have this idea that all WoW players are addicted to the game.

They’re not.

It’s their choice to play it. If I wanted to quit WoW, I could easily pull it off. I just don’t want to.

They’re not addicted to the game. They’re addicted to the friends and the people they’ve met playing this game. The reason I play WoW is because of the people I play with.

Told you the reason was simple.