Psynister tagged me to do a “Warcraft – year in review” post a couple of weeks ago, but being in Christmas whirlwind mode, I decided to save it for an almost new year post (I figured it was apt anyway).

Here are the questions/topics:

My Warcraft Year in Review
1. What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you’d never done before?
2. What was your favorite new place that you visited?
3. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
4. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
5. What was your biggest failure?
6. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
7. What do you wish you’d done less of?
8. What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?
9. Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.


1. What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you’d never done before?

Levelled a druid for something different (hahaha – just kidding!)

I embraced 10 man raiding. Back when I was raiding 25s “hardcore”, I had no time for 10s. They were not progression for me, so I had no interest in them. I got angry when people tried to make me do them; why would I want to do the same fights AGAIN but in a smaller raid – for lesser loot, and no progression recognition? I didn’t care about 10 man ladders, or even 10 man achievements, so why would I bother?

But then my guild fell apart, and reformed later as a close group of friends, to do 10 mans – and I discovered how much fun that size raid can be. Now I enjoy doing both size raids.

2. What was your favorite new place that you visited?

Hmm. I love “green” zones – like Howling Fjord, the basin, etc. I adore the music in Storm Peaks, I can’t even tell you how much. The phasing in Icecrown is exciting to progress through. I was impatient for the Culling of Stratholme instance because I love Caverns of Time instances where you can see how the landscape once looked (I was just disappointed that it doesn’t allow you to wander, as you can in Old Hillsbrad). It’s tough to pick a favourite.. but I think I’ll go with Storm Peaks. The music, the quest lines.. and even the Hodir quests – I love it all.

3. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

Guild stability.

4. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Bringing Inexorable back.

5. What was your biggest failure?

Not blogging consistently. Two jobs and reforming a guild makes it difficult. In 2010 I’d like to be more consistent with the timing of my posts, even if I can only post once a week.

6. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

I absolutely love the new dungeon finder system, I think Blizzard have done an amazing job with it. I love doing random groups with people, but I always hated that I would get an invite, then start heading to the instance, only to find that the others haven’t left Dalaran yet, so after they finally get a wriggle on and get out there, it’s 10-15 minutes later before we can start. This way, I can hit a button, find a group, and zip straight there (and straight out). No more waiting for stragglers – which was what I hated most.

I NEVER used the old LFG tool, ever. I was unsure about using the new one – but as soon as I tried it, I fell in love. Good job, Blizz!

I also got very excited for Ulduar’s release, because I’m in love with titan architecture, and couldn’t wait to see if the inside lived up to the outside.

7. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Stressing over guild dramas, and being the guild mother. I want to be a guildmaster, not a guildmother.

8. What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?

There are a few that I really enjoy, I like Restokin for all things druid (leaning more to the theorycrafting side), Matticus for general healing and guild relations.. but there are a whole bunch on my blogroll that are a great mix of beefy content, random musings, gorgeous site design, wit and humour, etc. It’s hard to pick a favourite because I like them all for different reasons

9. Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.

1. Never let your raid team fall into the habit of relying on a single person to push them through content, to the point where if that person is absent, the group falls to the floor and people claim that they can’t go on (and that the officers are failing because they’re not stepping in to start pushing people again). I’m talking about seasoned raiders who could do Naxx25 in their sleep, but whining that the raids are horrible/bad/messy when one person isn’t there to lead. I’m not buying that anymore. You can’t do Naxx25 without someone telling you what to do? I want raiders who don’t need to have someone holding their hand to know the trash pulls, or get through frogger, or run back and buff up.

2. Bite the bullet and get rid of the bad eggs before things get worse. Basically, I’m not going to tolerate people acting like jerks this round, no matter how good they are at raiding. I don’t often put my GM hat on, I like to think that the guild can mostly run itself, but if I see you treating people badly, acting like a jerk, or giving us a bad name, expect to cop an earful, a benching, maybe even a boot. The health and atmosphere of my guild is more important to me than having a “top DPSer” on the roster.

I don’t expect people to hold hands and sing songs, but I won’t put up with people stirring trouble, talking others down, or generally acting like idiots. No more Mr Nice Keeva!


Farewell 2009, onto 2010!

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• Short break
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• Wanted: more Resto Druid blogs

When I reformed the guild to do 10s and socialise, I said no more 25s. Weekend PUGs are fine.. but the stress and strain of running a 25man raiding guild is too great, and we wanted to avoid that.

But since then, people started itching for 25s again. Our 25man PUG (part guild, part PUG) has killed Faction Champions in TOGC. The guild got a taste for raiding again, and a ripple of eagerness went through the ranks.

I wasn’t sure. But I didn’t want to pull up my GM boots and flatly deny them. So we put it to a vote. Evidently a lot of people have been wanting to get back to 25s.. and so here we are, preparing for 25man Icecrown..




I’m excited, a bit scared too. It’s no secret that we’ve split and reformed several times. There’s no knowing what will happen this time.. but the enormous support and flood of quality applications is really great. People still see us as a force on the server, I suppose.

Despite having even less free time.. I believe I will blog better while raiding 25s. I always did, I think. I adore 10s, and will keep running them, but I always felt as though 25s were the real meat for me, and without them, it took away part of what I enjoyed writing about – the endgame tactics that I loved exploring, tweaking, and sharing. I’m excited to be getting that back, for my blog.

Anyway – must go – I have a guild bank to cleanup and restock (*glee!*).

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Hi everyone!

There’s not much happening in the world of the druid at the moment – Blizzard and the dataminers are dribbling a few 3.3 tidbits to us now and then, but mostly things are quite quiet.

I wanted to post to say that I may be absent for a week or two; for various reasons:

That darn fox continues to stalk my chickens, and yesterday it took the last, lone guinea fowl that we inherited 10 years ago. I’d grown to love it – ugly and noisy as it was. Very sad. So until I can finish my new chicken coop (in about 2 weeks), I have to get up at 5am each day to stand guard. I’m happy to report that nothing got eaten this morning, except for me. Summer mosquitoes are very much FTL.

I have a rather exciting little personal project that I am working on – business stuff, not WoW related, but drawing on the fun that I always have when I’m blogging here. I’m firing on all creative cylinders at the moment, and need to set aside some time to work on it in earnest, or I may just explode.

The boss of my second job has thrust upon me a bunch of expensive and enthralling training materials for a new project she wants to undertake on the net. Stuff that’s right up my alley. So far I’m very excited about it (I think she’s trying to get me hooked on some kind of e-crack), but it means a lot of overtime and hard work. She did mention in passing that if we got things rolling and made a decent amount from it, that she would take me to Las Vegas next year, all expenses paid. Oh, okay, that sounds pleasant…

So as they say here in Oz, I’m flat out like a lizard drinking.

So between 5am starts, serious overtime, and personal projects, I’ve had to pull out of raiding for a couple of weeks and don’t really even have time to play other than to indulge my OCD afternoon routine of log onto Thawm, make an Icy Prism; log onto Kiiva, do a transmute; log onto Earka, do a transmute; log onto Keeva, do a transmute for the bank (I have three alchemists!); then log onto my bank alt to check auctions and distribute funds as necessary.

Other than that, I’m not going to have much WoW-time for a couple of weeks – I’m even having problems keeping up with my blogroll!

So I’m not dead, I’m just buried for a while.



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Possibly Related Posts:

• Short break
• Wanted: more Resto Druid blogs
• I got bored; here’s the new TBJ

Warning: links in this post may contain offensive language and may be NSFW – click at your discretion


I need to send a quick shout-out to the newest addition to my blogroll – Cows from Cows Loves Cake.

I feel that I have found in him a kindred spirit – not just because of his love of cake, but because of his unrelenting and unapologetic seething hatred of the Oculus. To say I identify with him would be a gross understatement.

Cows’ blog doesn’t pull any punches – he says what’s on his mind and he doesn’t pussyfoot around.

And by that, I mean that he swears like a sailor, and makes no apologies.

But honestly – I find it really refreshing, because he’s not putting up that blogging facade where you need to act nice all the time, watch your words, stay calm, be neutral, don’t ever be abrasive. Not this one. Here’s my blog, here’s what I think, and I’m not going to reword anything to make it more P.C. so that I don’t offend your delicate sensibilities.

I genuinely love it and I can’t wait to read more.

It’s also great to have a couple of super-hardcore druids on the blogroll; I’m not in a hardcore 25man guild anymore but it’s good to have a mix of different player types in the druid blog community. I like having a well-rounded mix of blogs to read, from all walks of WoW. And you know I’ll always embrace people who are willing to do the theorycraft (read: math) where I can’t…

Welcome, Cows!

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Hey guys,

I just wanted to give a quick plug to a new blog on my list, Droodjerky’s The Overpowered Druid.

What makes this blog different is that Droodjerky provides live streaming of his guild’s raids – from his point of view as a resto druid. So you can watch how Algalon and various hard modes are done, from the POV of our class. Very handy if you’re trying to get a handle on these fights.

Something a little different!

Possibly Related Posts:

• Short break
• Blizz dev chat on Twitter – druid question roundup
• Wanted: more Resto Druid blogs

First off, thank you everyone so much for your kind words about the new site. You guys are awesome. I think it looks nicer than the old site – but I’ve had so many people rave about how much they love the new one. /blush!

Despite a few hiccups and frustrations, I really enjoyed putting it together, and now I get to actually use it!

There are still a few bits and pieces I need to fix, but they are minor, and can wait until I have a few spare moments. I also have a couple of blogroll links to fix up, I’ll try and do that soon (don’t forget to let me know if your link has changed, or you want to be added).


How to do it for yourself

While I was creating the new site, I put together a bunch of pages that didn’t exist on the old one. One of those pages is in the Guides area, and it’s all about how to create your own WoW blog.

Phae’s original article is what first inspired me to start up my blog, and since I haven’t seen anything similar since then, and since the blogging community is in a constant state of flux, I thought there might be some budding bloggers out there who needed that gentle nudge forward to get them started.

This is your nudge! If you want to start your own but you feel a little overwhelmed, or you’re not sure where to start, this should help.



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Click here for the full article:     Advice on starting your own blog


Topics covered:



• Planning

• Getting started
• The pros and cons of self-hosting
• Finding a host and securing a domain
• Installing WordPress (if you’re self-hosting)
• Choosing your blog’s look and layout
• Graphics
• Your first post – and beyond
• What to write
• When to write
• Advertising
• A few mistakes to avoid (this is valuable!!)
• Resources


Plus a “TLDR” summary at the end, which is basically a checklist of things to do (and not do) when you set out to make your own blog.




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TBJ is almost a year old now. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, learned from the other bloggers, and gone through the transition of free hosted blogging to self hosted, css-wrangling code jockey. I used to build websites on and off, but it was probably the best part of a decade ago.. and I kinda stopped around the time that CSS was really taking off. So I understood the concept of CSS, but didn’t have much experience – which made editing my theme quite difficult. Nothing that a bit of reverse engineering or plain old guesswork couldn’t fix, though. And voila! I got there in the end!

You don’t have to start out with anything fancy, though. The most important thing is what you write, not how pretty it looks. Some of the best WoW blogs out there have very plain layouts, but their content is what draws readers in and keeps them. So don’t worry too much about having a fancy blog – jump onto WordPress.com or Blogspot and start up a free blog (and they still have great themes you can use).

Make sure you do a little planning first, as I have explained in the article – but if you really want to blog, don’t put it off – jump in and give it a try.

And if you’re a new druid blogger, drop me a line and give me a link to your site so I can check it out and add it to my blogroll!

Come join the WoW blogging family!

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I’ve pretty much been working on the new site day and night. It’s finally finished – I hope you all like it!

Note: I had a slight hiccup and had to take the site back down again – had some troubles with the layout not playing nice in IE8 (I didn’t realise, because I had IE6 and it looked fine – I really wish I could punch IE in the face, honestly). But that’s why I love having the Maintenance Mode plugin – if I find that my site has a big problem, I can hide it for a little while, while I fix things. With a hammer.

After a lot of kicking, screaming, sobbing, sulking, some choice naughty words and an air of general crankiness (you could say I don’t like to be beaten), I think it is fixed now; mostly thanks to a gnome friend giving me a hand. Always go to gnomes for tech help, they know their stuff.

He diagnosed a mild case of PEBKAC and we fixed it right up.

So I’m feeling a little sheepish, but now it should show up nicely in various browsers. Hopefully. If you notice that there are formatting problems in your browser, can you please let me know? Just be gentle – I know very little about CSS and I’ve really tried hard to make this a much better site than the old one. I’m hoping there aren’t any major bugs though – I don’t want to take the site down again now that it’s up.



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The new stuff:



• I’ve added a contact page that shows you how to contact me:
  

  • I have a new email address, so you can now email me at my treebarkjacket address instead of my personal address. I don’t mind people using my other address of course, but this is so much nicer!

  • I’ve also added a contact form so that you can send questions and suggestions straight from this site.
  • Finally, I’ve added an upgraded version of cbox in the sidebar, so that you can leave me short messages on the fly.
• You should now have the ability to edit your comments (no more typos or double posts preserved for all to see), plus you can add smilies to your comments!
• The subscribe button in the sidebar should give you a whole list of different subscription options, including email. I need to get a Feedburner feed happening at some point but it wasn’t working for me while I’ve had my site in Maintenance Mode, so I’ll worry about that later.
• You should also be able to choose to subscribe to comments on individual posts.
• TBJ now has a favicon – a Tree Bark Jacket! Just for fun.
• You should now see some possibly related posts on the end of each article.
• I’ve installed a plugin called Better Search, which is a hundred times better than the default WP search function. It should serve up results to you based on relevance, not just every post (in date order) that contains your search terms (ick). I really wanted to make this site more user-friendly than the old one, so I hope this plugin helps.
• Categories and tags – I promise I will be diligent this time and always include a category! Luckily I have installed a plugin that won’t let me post an article without a category. Exactly the kind of thing that I need.




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New Pages

You’ll see that I have added some static pages in the navbar at the top and on the sidebar. I particularly wanted to have a menu page for guides, so that people could find them easily.

The sidebar pages are for past and future druid changes, and changes on the way in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm. They are pretty straightforward but I’ll be highlighting these pages and explaining them in another post soon.

I’ve also created a guide for starting your own Warcraft blog; there will be a separate post about this, too, soon.



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Please let me know if:

I have tested the site in a couple of different browsers, but if you happen to come across something that isn’t working properly, please let me know.

Some things I’d really appreciate:



• If you find a broken link, image, or something generally seems to not be working, please contact me.

• If you’d like to be on my blogroll, please send me your link (and if you would like, a 202 x 44 banner).
• Please update your bookmarks, links, and feeds.
• Please be gentle on me if you spot any sloppy code. I honestly don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m always willing to learn how to do things better, but for now if you could ignore my disgraceful abuse of deprecated html, that’d be swell..


Some things that may/may not be working yet:



• Avatars on comments – if they’re not working, I’ll have to fiddle with it.

• My comments in a different colour – I had problems with this, it’s not hugely important but it would be handy to be able to tell my comments apart at a glance.


The site should generally be working, but there may be some minor tweaks to be made.

Note that in future I will also be making use of the “more” tag so that the front page isn’t fifteen feet long.

Welcome to the new TBJ! I hope you like it.

Now I can sleep. And play some Warcraft. And get some eye drops.

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• Short break
• Wanted: more Resto Druid blogs
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After agonising over it quite a bit, I’ve decided I won’t be getting the Blizzcon live stream this year.

I really wanted to do it so that I could post any druid-related news as it is relayed, and without relying on sites like MMO and wow.com to post transcripts to copy/paste.

(It’s not the end of the world, I just wanted to be able to do it myself, not just re-post the other sites’ news.)

There are a few reasons why I decided not to do it:



• I’m working hard towards my RL goal of buying a house, and $50 counts!
• The panels I want to see are at 6:30am on Saturday and Sunday for me. That’s not a huge deal, I’ve been up early for WoW commitments before, but it’s still a factor. If I wanted to post things as we hear about them, I’d have to be up really early to catch the panels (I don’t care about the archives/replay).
• There’s no guarantee that they won’t cut to random stuff like behind-the-scenes or interviews, meaning the few segments I want to see may be cut short. I would be very cranky if they cut to stuff I didn’t care about. Lots of people have asked about this, but no answers have been given by Blizzard, and if it’s the case, I think that’s pretty crappy, to be honest. If people are paying $40 ($50 here) they should be able to choose which “channel” (stage) they want to watch. It’s not difficult to do.
• Australian internet isn’t the greatest, and I live in a rural area, making it worse. There’s a very good chance it will be very poor quality – especially if my connection forced me to use the low-def version. I guess I should be grateful that I have internet – but boy is it suck compared to a lot of other countries! Australia really needs to get its A into G, as we say here. Give us better internets!


So all up I would be paying $50 for poorly streamed (due to my connection) video, at 6:30am on Saturday and Sunday, and the coverage may not stay focused on the 3 panels I want to watch, anyway. I really wanted to catch the news live, but I can’t justify $50 for about 3 hours of panels that could be cut short and may well be very low quality due to my backwater internet.

So I’ll just have to suck it up and deal with compiling druid info from the main sites. It’s disappointing to me – I would rather be posting it first-hand, but it’s not the end of the world.

To everyone on their way to the con itself – have a blast! Wish I could be there with you!

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A few people have enquired about the progress of my new blog, so I thought I would give a quick report.

I had some problems with the initial WordPress install and a bunch of 500 errors. My host has been really fantastic though, and fixed them quickly for me.

Back in May I had a crash course in WordPress when I created my (now abandoned) guild website. It wasn’t too difficult. I used to dabble in web design, but that was about a decade ago, and I never sat down and learned any of this new-fangled CSS stuff. Steep learning curve.

No matter. I might not know a single thing about CSS, but I’m pretty darn good at opening up a template file, reading through it for something that vaguely resembles the part that I want to change, fiddling with the settings, saving, and then checking to see if that changed what I wanted. In fact, I’m a champion at this. I am a VERY stubborn person, and I won’t walk away until the template is doing what I want it to do. I’ve been able to stumble through and get it to look how I want – I’m quite proud.

The original template author would probably cry if she saw it, though.

You should feel for my friends too, it’s been a rollercoaster ride with me alternating between “!@%$@%!### I HATE THIS THING ITS BROKEN I CAN’T MAKE ANYTHING WORK WHY WON’T IT WORK THIS IS RIDICULOUS” and (2 minutes later) “I am amazing. I’m so thrilled with how this is looking.”

They must be so tired





Anyway – here’s the deal:

- domain and space acquired (stop trying to peek!)
- WordPress installed
- theme butchered to my liking
- plugins added: contact form, related articles, etc
- lots of stupid test posts made


To do:

- put the static pages together (About, Blogroll, etc)
- transfer old content over (?)
- test that everything works
- put stuff in the sidebar
- little stuff like a favicon, wowhead links, etc
- ??
- profit


I’m not sure about bringing the old content over, or whether I should just start again (I would bring over particular guides etc, however).

Obviously, bringing it over means people will be able to search the older content.. but I worry that it’s going to be a pain in the butt to do. WordPress has that annoying problem where it strips out your superfluous p and br tags, meaning that you have no extra line breaks between your paragraphs. I use those a lot.

150+ posts, no paragraph spacing.

On one hand, having ALL of my content on the new site is logical – all in the one place, for people to search. On the other hand, do I want 150 posts that look like ass? Is it better to have an archive of all the posts, and have them looking kinda bad.. than to just start fresh and say “go here for older posts” and point back to blogspot? I’m not sure what to do. I’m leaning towards “of course you have to import it” but ugh..

I suppose I won’t know how bad it is until I give it a try!

At any rate.. I still have quite a lot to do before the new site can go live. It is a gradual project, at the moment.







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• Short break
• Wanted: more Resto Druid blogs
• I got bored; here’s the new TBJ