Little update about the site; I added a section in my About page that links to some of my good friends in the game.

I'm slowly getting back into editing / upgrading things on the site, so hopefully I can get some more of my ideas out there.

Not a big update, but an update none the less. I got into Kara for the Chess event and for Prince, and got something from my Wishlist: [Ruby Drape of the Mysticant].

Not much more going on then that, I haven't played much this week. One thing that I've been playing with is changing how I update my profile. Currently, I use an addon that pulls out all the data you see (plus more), and just parse that. It works great, but only when I can remember to upload the file to the site in order to be parsed. What I've been doing is seeing what kind of data I can pull off of the WoW Armory's XML files. It's not quite as detailed as the addon I use, but all it would take to update my profile is a click of a link, which can be done from anywhere, whereas I currently have to be on my computer that has WoW installed... Guess it all comes down to how bored I get.

Haven't been doing much since my last post, but I made a couple of little updates to the site today. I added an Item Wishlist page, which I'll periodically update to show what I'm trying to get, loot-wise.

I updated a few of my Macros too, so have a look at those.

Lastly, I thought the following comic was pretty funny... especially if you've ever done any PvP.

I was bored today, so I decided to update the item stats code. What's that mean? It means that I simplified this to work better with this. Here's how Itemstats does it: Itemstats looks up an item by name or ID, takes the toolitp info and stores all the HTML (among other various fields, 7 in total) in the database. With my heavily modified version, now it stores the item's id, name, color and icon. Now take that data from my database, and have it generate a URL that links to Wowhead, throw on the "Powered By..." javascript, and poof! I get something like this!
[Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian]


Also, on the left-hand side with all the other stuff, below the Random Tip, I put in a search box for the site. Dunno if it's needed, but it can't hurt to have it there.

Just a quick update to post about my absence. We gots a new puppy a few months ago, and since he's just over 4 months old, he still needs lots of attention (which I don't mind giving). I don't get as much time on the computer as I'd like, but hopefully it'll change soon.

Also, the laptop that I made all the site modifications on (using a test server) is being watched by Big Brother, so I can only try to work on it here at home. I do have a big site overhaul coming soon, I just need to make sure there's no bugs left.

Anyways, that's where I've been, and here's some cuteness of our puppy Monty:

From Monty

Patches


Karazhan


Site Changes

Something else new on the site: Gallery Ratings. You can now rate each image in the Gallery on a scale of 1 to 5 (lowest to highest, respectively). Check out this example and rate it to see it in action.

Yes, I know that IE has some layout issues, and Opera thinks you can keep voting, even though it votes the first time. Opera users: do a full-refresh on the page to see the result after you vote. Safari and Firefox users, though, seem to be sitting pretty well.

Been bored lately, so the profile page got a bit of an update. Now I have the ability to show many different characters, instead of only the one I specify. On the side of the Character sheet, there are 2 tabs; one being for my mage (Unbarc) and the other being for my hunter (Barcana). If I start any other serious alts, they'll be on here too.

It's been awhile (again) since my last update, and I've been pretty busy. For the life side, my wife and I were able to find the perfect house. It's a 4 bedroom / 2 bathroom house on a 1 acre lot. On the south side of the property, there's a little grove that separates us from the neighbors; on the north side, there is a community center as our neighbor, so there's a parking lot between us and them. It's got a lot of trees in the yard, and it takes forever to mow, but I don't care, because it's mine. We're still unpacking (it's been just over 3 weeks since we moved in), but at least we don't have a deadline on that.

We moved out of our apartment a month before our lease ended. We were totally prepared and willing to pay for the last month, but on the day we were moving out, they call us and say:

Landlord Wrote:

Are you moving out today? We have somebody who wants your apartment. The sooner you can get out and get the place cleaned, the sooner we can move them in and pro-rate back what you pay.

The moving of boxes and junk took ~4.5 hours on Monday, and we were out of the apartment by Wednesday. My wife went into the office to pay the rent, and they said there was no need, since they asked us to be out earlier then our lease was for. That means we got a completely rent/mortgage-free month.

Lately, I've been getting a lot of new toys... after months (count: 9) of working for my dad, I finally got my LCD HDTV. Then came the HD DVD player for my Xbox 360 (TNMT at 1080i looks amazing, btw), and last night I got a new router. That last one wasn't planned, my old one was on the outs.


On the site, there's been some good changes. Although they won't be completely obvious to visitors (like most updates I do), there's one I like. If you head over to the Gallery, and click on down to a picture, you'll notice something different. An image loads in its own page now (example), and is all database-driven. Before, it was just reading from a config file to populate all the albums.

Pretty soon, there will be some forums available on the site as well. I decided to add them for a few different reasons. One being the fact that my old domain is no more, and I need a forum for some things, and the other reason is so visitors of the site can contact me if they want. I was thinking about trying to code some sort of comment system for the news posts, but I didn't want to deal with all the anti-spam measures. I'm not sure how long until it's working, but there'll be a link in the Navigation menu, and I'll post something.


On the game side, I haven't played much the past few weeks (basically since I moved). The other day I helped a friend of mine, Barddius, hit his first 70. Now I'm trying to get Device back into playing the game, getting to 70, so we can start a 3v3 Arena team. My Hunter , Barcana, is just shy of getting to level 65, so maybe once I get her up all the way, I can get her into the Arena team.

Recently, Apple released their Safari browser for Windows. I installed it, just to see how it worked with this site. Turns out, it didn't play well with my gzipped JavaScript files (which helps the site load MUCH faster). So, in lite of that, I made some Safari-specific files, and now the site seems to function completely fine (tooltips, effects, etc).

Also, for the time being, those of you still using IE6 will have to live with the ugly PNG transparency bug. I got tired of the somewhat crappy-looking .gif images of the UI portions of the site, so now they're in PNG (smoother edges, shadowing, just all-around better looking). At some point, I might try to incorporate a fix for IE6. Other then that, it looks like my site is now compatible with IE(7), Firefox, Opera, and now Safari.

For a small WoW note, patch 2.1.2 was released the other day.

I've still been playing my hunter, Barcana, a lot. I just dinged 52 on her last night. Playing a hunter is pretty fun... being Beast Mastery specced, it's pretty easy to take on multiple mobs, take on higher level mobs, and do group quests by myself. I tamed Rawr at about level 15. Device and I ran over to the Draenei starting area so I could tame him, since this is the only place to get a Ravager pet before going to Outland.

Ok, Azerothianites. My old domain was on the verge of expiration, and I decided to switch registrars. In doing so, I decided to register a new domain, www.unbarc.com. A little more fitting, don't you think? Once I get my old domain straightened out, I'll try and forward all that traffic to the new domain.

On the professions front, I made it up to 374, and have had the past 4 items I've made not get me over that last little skill. Hopefully tonight or tomorrow I'll have tailoring maxed, and the ability to make 20 slot bags, and finish my Spellfire set.

Speaking of which, since I last posted (yeah, I need to get back into posting more often), I made myself a [Spellfire Belt] and [Spellfire Gloves], and fitted each one with a [Potent Noble Topaz] and a [Glowing Nightseye]. Vera nice. All that's left is to make a robe, then try and start saving up the mats/money for the Spellstrike set.

Patch 2.1.0 came out recently, with a ton of changes. One of the best changes: gold spam reduction. Before the patch, I was getting between 10-15 gold-spam whispers per login, now I've gotten a total of 3 since patch day.

After almost 2.5 years of playing WoW, I finally had my first world-drop epic drop when I was farming in Netherstorm. After a few days of sitting on it, I put it up in the AH for 500 starting, 700 buyout, and it ended up selling for 671. Needless to say, that money was spent the next day on mats to try and max out the tailoring.

Tomorrow night, my wife and I are going to be taking a real look at a house. In the past, we've just been looking online, but now we're actually starting to go out and see what the houses look like in person. We found one we really like, so hopefully it'll turn out that way for real.

It's been 2 months, so I figured I should post some sort of update. I haven't really been playing Unbarc a whole lot lately. For a little while I was working on leveling my alt hunter, Barcana. The past week or so, though, I decided to drop my previous profession of Jewelcrafting (keeping Mining for some cash), and I took up Tailoring. Surprisingly, it didn't take too long to get up to 335 tailoring... Jewelcrafting took FOREVER. Right now I'm in a slump because of a lack of [Netherweave Cloth]. It's going to take me a while, but here's the reason(s) I switched:
[Spellfire Belt]
[Spellfire Gloves]
[Spellfire Robe]

As for the site, I've done some new things. There's a new Tutorials section. There isn't much there yet, but it's something I can add to over time. Right now I've written a couple of short tutorials about WoWMapView and how to convert WoWModelView models to Lightwave (you can see some examples here).

Pretty soon, the 2.1.0 will be going live. This is the biggest changelog yet... my version is 1322 lines of text long (my version being HTML-formatted), and the previous longest one was 1.11.0 with only 823 lines.

On the loots side, I haven't gotten much. I think the only thing of late would be these from a quest:
[Shattrath Wraps]

On the other side of the computer screen, my wife and I are starting the process of finding a house, which I'll probably start playing even less because of this. We're so tired of living in an apartment, and we're really looking forward to having someplace we can crank up the surround-sound without the people on the other side of the wall complaining, or doing the same thing.

Another boring day at work results in more site changes. On the Profile page, I finally found a nice clean way to grab all of my Reputation and Skills, and they can be seen from the tabs at the bottom of my character frame.

A little bit bigger change was done to the news posts. I've added the ability to tag each post I make, which will allow people to view somewhat related entries at once. The list of tags will be at the end of each entry, and are in no specific order.

Also, I've been trying to get my Jewelcrafting up to at least a skill of 300 (that's when you can start to cut gems). I did get my mining up to 375 last week before I left Runetotem, now I just need to mine a bunch of lower-level ore to prospect. I'm trying to spend as little money as possible through the AH to skill it up, and it's proving to be quite a feat.

Did a run of Tempest Keep: The Arcatraz and became Revered with The Sha'tar, so I was able to get my Heroic key, and a nice helm enchant that does +22 spell damage and +10 hit chance.

Been a little while since my last post, so I figured now would be a good time as any to do so. First off, there were a couple of new patches released, 2.0.7 and 2.0.8. Now before the Burning Crusade came out, the most number of patches between major updates (1.#.0) was 5. This time around, there has been 7 updates, and no major patch. They even skipped 2.0.2 for some reason.

I'll be going back through the current changelogs and adding an Undocumented Changes section, via WoWWiki.com. These changes are observed by the players, are not part of the official Blizzard release notes, and may not be agreed upon by everybody, but I like the addition of it.

On the side of my Site Upgrades, there's been some you may have noticed. Firstly, I finally updated the in-game rendition of me in the header and on the profile page.

Second, I re-added an Image Gallery back. I used to have the popular Gallery integrated in the site, but I ended up not liking how the end-result looked. So this past week I decided to just code my own. It's very basic, and has some nice effects, but isn't overloaded with stuff I don't really need.

Lastly, I started playing around with WoW Model Viewer and Lightwave again, only this time I am able to get the texture along with the model. If you have a look in my renders gallery, you'll see some quick renders of stuff.

So with the days being shorter, and the workdays seeming to be longer, lately I've been pretty bored here at work. What could come from this, but a new site feature: Unbarc's WoW Site RSS Feed. It's not the best coding job, but over time I'll hopefully have it fine-tuned. If you use Firefox or IE7, you should see the icon for the feed, but if not, here it is. For right now, it only shows the latest news posts (which is currently limited to the past 15, depending on how I feel), but in the future I may add one that shows a site changelog, the WoW changelogs, etc.

I've been at it again, working busily on the site. There's been lots of code optimizations and cleanup, and some new features (behind the scenes). I'm also working on a wiki for the site. Hopefully, it should be online soon enough (I had to upgrade my server to php5 for the latest version of MediaWiki.

On the WoW front, I haven't gotten any loot for a while, so there's not been much to report. Closed Beta for the Burning Crusade started, so I'm anxiously waiting for that release. Unfortunately, I tried to upgrade my preorder to the Collector's Edition, and failed. All of the Gamestops/EB Games/Amazon are sold out. Damn them all.

I go on vacation tonight, and I just can't get any real stuff done here at work, so I made some updates on the site again. The first one you'll notice is the news. Going along with the rest of my site, I took some graphics from the game (in this case, the Gossip Frame), and made it hold all the news.

Second, is the Guild Roster that I've been working on. I've actually been tinkering with it for a little bit now, but I think it's pretty much done and ready to be live on the site. I also made one almost identical on my guild's website.

P.S. Up to 11 kills on Nef (22 breastplates), and still no NW.

A couple of nights ago, we cleared BWL up to Nef, and I happened to get the [Netherwind Belt], which brings me up to 6 out of 8 on my set. All I have left are the [Netherwind Mantle] and the [Netherwind Robes]. Last night was way too laggy to attempt Nef, so we cleared MC in just over 3 hours. Tonight, he should be dead, and since one of the other mages can't make it on, I have about a 1.2% chance to get the robes (double drop... /me crosses fingers).

Site Updates:
I've been working on some new improvements for the site. One being an image gallery, and the other being a rewrite of the way the url is displayed. For the url thing, I just did this to try and learn a bit about mod_rewrite in Apache. As for the gallery, I'm using an embedded version of Gallery2, and I'll be making it live on the site sometime soon.

Well, not much news lately (since I haven't really played all weekend), but I have updated my Profile recently. You'll notice that at the bottom of the page, there are 5 bags shown. These represent the bags I have on Unbarc, and show what I carry in them. Why would I do this? Because I'm bored as hell at work, that's why.

Last night I spent some time on the Test realm, messing with a few different specs. For about 3 days, I played with a talent calculator, and thought I had decided on an Elemental (Fire/Ice) spec, but after killing a bit with it, I realized that I didn't like it at all. So I went back to one of my previous specs that I had made, and hoepfully this will be what I settle with.

There are a few things I'll really have to get used to with this build...

1. No Arcane Power
2. No Arcane Mind (increases mana)
3. No PoM (insta-water no more)
4. Ice Block (never had/used before)
5. Ice Barrier (see #4)

I guess I'll just see how it goes.

I've spent the last few days updating my Profile page. Noticable improvements? Click on my talents, and have a look. They're now arranged like they are in the game, instead of how I had them before. I've also made it possible to see my fire spec or what fire resistance gear I wear (I'll be adding links on my profile at some point to both of these).

I've also added a link to a bankless profile, which will just leave the bank section out (but only when I have the bank enabled in the settings).

I've updated my Macros section to fit more with how I've done other parts of the site (using in-game UI graphics).

Last night, we killed Onyxia, cleared MC through Shazzrah, and made a couple of attempts on Chromaggus. Unfortunately, we only got him down to 4% and 10%, respectively, before calling it a night. Hopefully tonight we'll get him on the first try (Time Lapse and Incinerate, for those of you wondering) and have a night at learning more about the Nefarian encounter.

Loots: [Sapphiron Drape] from Onyxia

Patch 1.10.2 went live yesterday, and it brought along some headaches. We started off in Molten Core, and moved to Blackwing Lair after we had some hunters to help kite. Vael was being a butt of sorts, because when he did the tail-whip, it could cause people to disconnect.

No loots to report, but I am now only 2 [Golden Pearl]s away from getting the Spellpower Enchant for my [Azuresong Mageblade], which I got 2 weeks ago. Damn pearls, last time I farmed them it took me 10 minutes to get both, and now it's taken over 4 hours of farming with nothing to show. Guess I should have just kept going last time...

As for the site, I haven't been working on it much. I upgraded a site that I host for some friends, so that has been a big task. The only real change that I can think of that I've done (besides site optimizations and administration things), is add some more custom things to the Itemstats tooltips, like this:

I'm currently in the process of changing the news backend from being in a php file, to being read from a database.

Update: After a morning of messing with some changes, it seems that all is working pretty well.

Because work has been extremely boring lately, I decided to go through the old patch notes and make them a little better by adding Item Links into them. Have a look at the 1.10.1 Patch Notes linked in my previous posting to see.

I spruced up the Itemstats tooltip (Especially in FireFox) a bit. I went from the default style, to one more true to the game. Here's a sample: [Choker of the Fire Lord]

I've also decided to make this site my blog, instead of what I already have set up. I've invested so much time into making this site, I barely even look at the blog any more.

I've added some new features to test on the site. They don't really have much use, but it's just something fun to play with. To test it out, go to my Profile page, and drag around the character/bank windows. To reset the window, double-click the area you can drag, and to temporarily close the window, click the close button.

Since a new version of the Atlas AddOn came out, I decided to update my Instances page to look like the addon. Props to Dan Gilbert for making such a kick-ass addon.

Decided to make the site go live today, neat stuff here.