A new dawn

I first started writing this blog during Burning Crusade and my blog banner image was a lovely shot of Jez against the back drop of the Nagrand sky. It seems only fitting therefore that as I begin writing about the new world of Northrend and my adventures there my blog banner should change to reflect the dawning of this new world.

I took the screenshot I used in the image on the northernmost cliffs of Icecrown. Perhaps if (when!) I get a proto-drake I will update the image again *grin*

Terrible

I am a terrible, terrible blogger and I apologise to anyone who still checks in with me *ashamed face*. I have lots of ideas for posts, some great screen shots I've been collecting and have found absolutely no time to write *sad face*. With the holidays almost upon us I hope, intend even, to remedy the dire lack of content around here!

Random musings

I always think of some many topics to blog about during the day and try to remember to make notes of them so I can eventually get around to writing said posts. I also think of specific snippets which don't really make a whole post. Hence random musing time!

Shout out to the Twisted Nether Blogcast guys Fim and Bre! I had no idea you talked about my recent post about raiding laziness on episode 5, whee! If you haven't checked this blogcast out I urge you to do so - it's chock full of goodness. It was interesting to hear Fim and Bre's views on the whole laziness issue, they had a slightly different take on it from me - talking about the differences between alts going through farm content as opposed to new raiders but not really touching on the issue of people who have been in the guild for some time and raiding for some time but who still make no real effort to gem or enchant - except to say that if people aren't pulling their weight they have no compunctions about telling them to lift their game. I want to hear Bre's firm voice *grin*.

I am finding it even more difficult to keep up with my blog feeds these days. So many good blogs and so little time to read, comment and also actually write some decent content myself. I like to comment but am finding that I'm so intent on reading so many feeds that I'm spending less time commenting. This must be addressed!

In a non wow related note - I would like to take traditional advertising agencies out the back and beat them with lead piping in the shape of comic sans font for the monstrosities of website design they visit on their hapless clients

Hanging out in the BA chat room with a bunch of great fellow bloggers has been awesome fun - although I have to make sure I don't spend too much time chatting since I'm at work at the time. It's cool to get to talk directly to many of the bloggers I read. I've also added a whole bunch of new blogs to my feed (hence my issue above heh) and I'm getting inspired to write some posts on my view of several topics floating around in the nether.

That's it for my random musings, thanks for stopping by!

Is where I level my geek-fu

Amongst the things that I love are my computer (not in an unhealthy way thanks!) and the internets. When I manage to learn something new in regards to both that makes me happy. I like learning new things period so learning something new about stuff I'm really interested in is a bonus.

I've mentioned in another post that I have been experiencing some nasty frame rate issues in 25 man raids and I'd been looking into updating my PC. I had the plan in train when Emelin's PC decided to die a nasty motherboard failure kind of death. I swear it was a plot since it meant that Emelin's PC got rebuilt and I had to spend the weekend listening to him drooling over the awesome smoothness and beautiful appearance of the game with everything cranked up whilst I dealt with staring at the floor during the Tidewalker fight with every setting down to try and deal some decent DPS.

You can be certain that Monday morning I immediately proceeded to arrange the upgrade of my PC! I am lucky enough to work in an industry where I can get my hands on hardware at a cheaper cost than retail and prevail on an awesome helpful workmate to help me rebuild my PC. I opted for an Intel Core2 Quad CPU, gigabyte motherboard with both DDR2 and DDR3 slots (for future upgradability) and 4 x 1gig sticks of DDR2 RAM. I'd recently bought a new Gigabyte nVidia GeForce 9600 GT card so I naturally hung onto this. My mate installed the hardware for me and in an absolutely unheard of unbelievable act of god was able to reboot into Windows afterward - so no reformatting/reinstall needed. Crazy! There was one small hitch however - I didn't have a spare IDE cable for my DVD burner - solution grab a new SATA one. This is where my opportunity to improve my geek-fu came in as it was the end of the day and I was to pick the burner up on my way home and install it myself and then install the motherboard drivers.

Computers are generally like cars for me - I know how to drive them, I know how to maintain them but I'm not down with the stuff 'under the hood'. For me this was the equivalent of learning how to do an oil change - not rocket science but not something I was familiar with. So now I know the difference between IDE and SATA cables and would feel comfortable installing something like this again. Yay me! I can also happily report that after a few bumps I got my baby up and running again and was able to log into WoW, crank all the settings and enjoy frame rates of around 90 in Shatt. Of course the real test will be this weekend in TK. Fingers crossed!

Can I just say that, although I will always consider game mechanics more important than shiny graphics in a game, warcraft looks really gorgeous when you can see all the nice graphical touches. Yay! Shiny!

The other area where I was able to level my geek-fu was with a little CSS. I think I've mentioned before that I work with a bunch of web-designers and that, plus having my own blog, is causing a little design-fu to rub off on me which is great. I was able to use this power for the good by helping Grizz with some small formatting changes on his wordpress blog. All hail the power of Firebug!

Changing the default display size for post images for Blogger

Since tweaking my blog template to change the width I noticed that uploading images to display via the Blogger image tool no longer displayed them matching the width of my blog when uploaded as 'large'. This really bugged me as when I use the larger size image within a post I want the image to sit across the entire width of the post.

It took some google-fu but I did find the answer and thought it worthwhile sharing here so that there is one more place on the interwebs to find an answer. One option is to use an image hosting service for your images and link to them yourself, bypassing the controls used in the Blogger image upload tool. I didn't really want to have to do down this road so this solution suits me.

I'll use the example of my blog to explain how to get images to display at the full width of your post. When I tweaked my blog I changed the #main-wrapper width to 555 px (pixels) and including the .main padding-left of 20 px this gives me an effective post width of 535 px. Therefore when I prep images for use in my posts I crop them to 535 px wide in photoshop before uploading them (the height I crop to depends on the image).

When you use the Blogger tool to insert an image into your post if you look at the html view you get a messy bunch of code. You will notice that within this mess of html there are 2 references to your image:
href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yWKCK8sw_Xo/SDqDhfYb-lI
/AAAAAAAAAIk/TaCgypNzwYs/s1600-h/Firebug_Layout.png
and
src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yWKCK8sw_Xo/SDqDhfYb-lI
/AAAAAAAAAIk/TaCgypNzwYs/s200/Firebug_Layout.png
The first piece of html provides a link to the original image and the second piece is what tells the image to display in your post. You can see above that the only differences in these strings are that the second piece of html telling the image to display in your posts has S200 and the first one has S1600. I'm not 100% sure but I believe this to be the size setting in pixels for the width of your image. The example I've used above is for the image in this post. I selected the 'small' setting in the image tool and so the size setting for the image source html is 200, therefore the width of this image displayed in the post (edit: I checked using Firebug once I published and this is indeed the case). The S1600 used in the link html is as far as I know the maxiumum size in pixels for an image uploaded to Picasa.

So, to enable your image to display at full width you just need to change the size value for the image source html to 1600 as well. However it's important to note that if the image you uploaded is wider than the width of your #main-wrapper this could cause problems with your layout. Hence the reason I crop or resize my images in Photoshop first. I have read that you can change the value to the width you want but this hasn't worked for me where setting it to S1600 has.

Hope this info is of use to someone :)

Ps. The image from this post is a screenshot of the layout display from Firebug, a great Firefox add on that can help identify a lot of things to do with your template.

Adding a Tag Cloud to your Blogger Template

This UI post series intermission brought to you by my inability to stop tinkering with my new blog template. I think I'm almost finished. Maybe.

*grin*

The newest improvement is replacing what was becoming a lengthy tag list with a cloud. It's really quite straight forward if you are comfortable messing with the html template for your blog. You just need to follow the excellent instructions provided at phydeaux3. Note this code is for new Blogger xml templates only.

If like me you want your tag colours to be consistent with the colour scheme of the rest of your template you might find this hexadecimal to RGB colour conversion tool handy since the values for the cloud are RGB whilst the rest of the template uses hexadecimal.

You can also change the min and max font size as well as a bunch of other stuff depending on how confident you are with CSS. Hope this post is of help to someone out there.

Ring in the changes

Unless you're reading this post through a feed reader you'll have noticed some changes to my little home in the WoWosphere.

When I first started blogging I went with one of the default templates, but over time I've grown to quite dislike it. So, time to change it up. I've gone with another standard (Minima) but manipulated it to increase the page width. Seriously is anyone still using monitors with a max screen resolution of 800x600? I'm pretty sure that's the exception rather than the rule these days.

Check out the awesome new header image thanks to one of my work mates. Cheers! I owe you beer mate! I just love it but am also planning to change the image out every so often too once I get my hands on the .psd file. Will give me a good opportunity to learn some more Photoshop-fu.

I quite like the clean feel of this particular template and I seem to have copied over my various template additions ok (like the wowhead item script) but if you notice anything askew please let me know!

I've become quite obsessed with layout and interface design in the last few days (well extended that concern beyond my RL job is probably a more accurate observation) as I've also recently overhauled my UI. I'm planning a series of posts coming soon that illustrates the journey of my UI over the course of my time playing Warcraft. I'll also be discussing the mods I use and the how and why. Hopefully will be an interesting read.

I promised myself I would never blog about RL

And I really am determined to avoid it. Although I confess I just love reading TJ's blog about the truly strange and amusing (perhaps more to us than her) things that seem to occur to her on an almost daily basis.

That said, I did the LJ thing a few years back and before that kept written journals for a long time. And frankly nothing incredibly interesting really happens in my life.

But I want to apologise for my lack of posts and that means a reference to me the player behind the boingy eared night elf.

So I say sorry to the 2 or 3 of you who read this blog but RL has been a little crazy of late with work getting busier, a mother in hospital (she'll be fine) a fuller social calendar than usual (it's festival season here and there is theatre and live music to be seen!)and of course my Warcraft with raiding, arena, PVP and alt levelling taking up my time.

I have a plethora of different screenshots and a list of blog topics in hand and hope to get back to some more regular posting soon.

The Back Story - part the second or - No WoW widows here!

So I kinda skimped on a little detail in part the first. I didn't buy WoW straight off the bat... oh no.. I fell to the old 'free trial' gambit with the crack being supplied by the aforementioned co-worker. He hooked me up with the trial disk and with curiosity but no massive eagerness I fired up.

And loved it. The first hit's always free baby and I was hooked from the get go. I remember turning around to the manbeast and saying "I'm going to have to buy this and sign up for a subscription" after about 30 minutes to an hour of play.

So I should supply a little bit more back story to the back story here I guess. I'm of the female persuasion and have been in a relationship with the manbeast for a good long time. He was the one who first turned me on to PC gaming by introducing me to the wonderful Starcraft. I'd played PC games as a kid on the Commodore 64 but for a long time I played consoles, mainly due to having no PC and no money for one. I can tell you that shortly after we moved in together our first joint purchase was a PC. A crappy off the shelf PC but a PC none the less. Let's do the math on that one. Boy introduces girl to PC gaming, boy and girl only have one computer. Much fighting and tension ensue as computer time is contested. You bet your britches we got a second PC stat! Well as soon as we could afford it anyway.

So if we fast forward in time a few more years you will find us happily gaming away each on our own custom built PCs (we never made the mistake of buying off the shelf again). He was still into the stand alone games but I'd made the foray into online gaming with Puzzle Pirates . The manbeast just didn't get the whole MMO gig and became somewhat of a "Pirates Widower" bemused by my willingess to get up at 2am in the morning to attend blockades (sort of the piratey equivalent to raids) and the notion that you could become good friends with people you'd never physically met.

WoW changed all that, like a terrible link in the addiction chain I bought the game and passed my free trial disk on to him. The rest, as they say, is history.

*tap, tap* Is this thing on?

Widgets are fun! Widgets are cool! Especially when they use javascript. So I went off and searched (and searched and searched) BRK's archives till I found his post on adding the javascript that allows you to link to items in the Wowhead database and get some nifty roll over action plus pretty coloured text. Let's see if it's working shall we?

Tonight I finally amassed enough arena points to get the lovely Vengeful Gladiator's Waraxe huzzah! Now to ponder whether to spring for the Savagery or Major Agility enchant? I suspect being the not so theory crafting huntard that I am that some pestering of my fellow guildie hunters will follow in short order.

@#%#$%#! Who left these unpacked boxes in the hall!?

Starting a blog is a lot like moving into a new house I've decided. There is a settling in period. One needs to make decisions about the decor.. will those curtains match the feature wall colour and so on. Things are always a little uncertain at first and liable to change, plus there is a good chance of unpacked boxes in the hallway presenting hazards to travel.

I'm still getting to know my way around the blogger interface and options and I expect will be tweaking and what not as an ongoing process. For starters I definitely need some kind of header image! The blogger templates kinda suck but I am also lazy lazy lazy and this is an aside to WoW not the new focus of my free time so, well, you know.....