Posts Tagged ‘Blog’

Phoenix Reborn?

It most definitely was a Blizzardish soon, but there we go. A new post after a semester-long hiatus.

So, what happened to Altitis?

Real life, that’s what happened. While I don’t want to dwell on things too much (or turn this into a “fishing for sympathy” post), I went through a situation not unlike what Big Red Kitty went through. Oh, the circumstances were different, and WoW was a mere symptom of what had gone wrong in my life, but the background is similar.

Except in my case, I went a bridge too far, and almost failed to mend and amend what I once thought would be lasting for the rest of my life. My family was on the brink of dissolution, and I moved out for about six months, convinced it was the end. And while I used to qualify blogging as cathartic, I never found the strength to blog about that at all. That explains the long hiatus.

In the middle of it, I thought I would be able to resume blogging, but for some reason, I never managed to do so since that cryptic one-worder a few months back.

Against my pessimistic outlook six months ago, though, events took a turn for the better, and we finally worked things out.

This isn’t however a sob-story serving as the testimonial on how MMORPGs have ruined (or almost ruined) the life of yet another family. As I said, it was a mere symptom of things gone wrong – spending too long in the game, investing too much into the completely wrong thing. And it wasn’t just gaming either, my job had taken an overblown importance too. What happened is probably just one in a million similar stories, where the people change, the context changes, and the symptoms change, but to keep this short, where we went wrong was that my significant other and myself started to take each other for granted and stopped communicating on tiny issues at first, and then on bigger and bigger issues, and this almost brought our couple down.

So the only advice I can give to any gamer out there, in particular if you’re in a stable, long term relationship, and more so if you have kids: you may want, periodically, to examine your gaming habits and ask yourself if they are an innocuous hobby or have become escapism for you. If it’s the latter, it may be worth taking a honest look at your life,  figure out what you’re fleeing, and address the issue, because trust me, leaving your home while your 4-year old daughter starts asking “why is daddy taking his pillow with him?” is not an experience you will enjoy.

But that’s enough background already. This was then, and as I said, we finally worked it out a couple of weeks ago.

What is going to happen to Altitis?

Frankly, I don’t know really. When crap hit the fan, I jokingly remarked to my friend Adventsparky that at least I’d be able to play during raiding peak times. In reality, that never happened.

I continued playing WoW pretty casually for a while, first on my mage, and then I picked up my shammie and eventually reached level 80 with her.

At the same time, for the first time since joining in May 2005, I actually let my subscription run out, and didn’t notice for several weeks. And it happened a second time more recently – a few weeks ago, before moving back, I wanted to check out something in the game and found, again, that I could no longer do so.

I haven’t resubscribed since.

Interestingly enough, Adventsparky once asked me whether I was still playing the game, explaining that some evening this Spring he just logged out after a raid, and never logged back in. The heart isn’t in it anymore.

Oh, I read the cataclysm announcements, but they failed to raise any kind of enthusiasm. I think the only thought that entertained me was when reading about the split of the Barrens zone, I started wondering whether this would be the end of the Mankirk’s Wife jokes.

In reality, like many other commentators on the blogosphere, I now find myself playing various different games extremely casually, either purely single-player games, or trying out one of the several viable Free2Play MMOs out there: From Wizard101 to FreeRealms, over Jade Dynasty, World of Kung Fu and Runes of Magic. I’m currently exploring Dungeons and Dragons Online (which recently went Free2Play) a bit, when I have time. I’m not really far in the game.

World of Warcraft? A while ago, I pondered resubbing for the anniversary pet and the headless horseman event. I probably won’t do that any more. In reality, the Free2Play games out there, and their microtransaction schemes allowing you to buy and consume content at your leisure, represent simply much more entertainment value for my money than shelling out 15€ / month for WoW when I might play it for little more than a couple of hours at best, if at all.

And while I could definitely afford it, I also find that the subscription fee actually participates in generating a compulsion to play in me, at the exclusion of other games, becoming enough a narrow focus that it might again draw me in and provoke another spiral that may, next time around, no longer come with a happy ending.

So the future of Altitis is similar to what a few other former WoW bloggers have done – altitis no longer confined to one game, but offering, perhaps, comments, reviews but also broader thoughts on several games.

Or maybe not. Time will tell.

In the meantime, the tagline of the blog has changed (I actually changed it when I posted the “Soon” message already), it has now become “Seeking Better Worlds”.

It is a combination of Dr. Richard Bartle‘s continuous action to try and push developers and players alike to create and demand better, richer virtual worlds. At the same time, it is also a play on the fictional Weyland-Yutani (of the Alien movie series) corporate slogan, “Building better worlds”, as a reminder that the quest for better virtual worlds in itself may very well become perverted if it turns, again, into a threat to my real life.

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Altitis Goes on Indefinite Blogging Hiatus

Just a quick note to my readers, due to real life circumstances I am currently (as has become obvious in the last month) not in the required mindset to keep on blogging. I can also not predict how long this state of affairs may continue, or whether I’ll ever resume writing.

I will therefore thank all my readers, commenters, respondents, and the fellow bloggers in the WoW gaming community for your participation, interaction and readership over the roughly 18 months during which Altitis has remained active.

Of course, since an inactive blog doesn’t actually take too much space in your feed readers, you can always keep it in in case I get back to blogging about WoW in the future. If not, thank you for the shared journey, and the best to all of you.

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SEO Basics for the WoW Blogger

Following Yashima’s mishap with one of the scumbag gold-selling splogs we all hate, it struck me that some WoW Bloggers may have little notions on how to improve their search engine visibility.

This post will be focused on self-hosted WordPress blogs, but some elements may be applicable to other platforms as well.

First, what is SEO, and why would your WoW blog want it?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, a field of activity which covers an innumerable amount of methods to promote a website. These methods are in general roughly divided into so called white hat activities, considered fully legit by search engines, and black hat, which if caught will get your site blacklisted. While most search engines have different rules of what is black hat and what not, as a very rough rule of fist, anything which is devised to deceive a search engine or artificially inflate your search results is to be considered off-limits.

The purpose of starting to apply some SEO techniques is to boost your search engine traffic and ensure all the wonderful, smart, funny, witty, insightful posts you write are positioned properly.

A word of warning before we begin, though. No search engine has published how their indexing mechanisms work exactly, nor how they rate content internally.  As a consequence, the field of SEO theory has always been full of exploratory techniques which would turn out, later on, to be totally worthless. Fortunately, we’re going to focus on the basics and these are quite straightforward.

As to the question of whether it’s worth it, well, in the grand scheme of things Altitis is a very small blog. Before Wrath (and due to a low posting volume), my readership was in average below 150 visits a day. If you were to Google last Friday (when I started writing this post) and type “death knight macros” as the search term, though, I was sitting in 4th position with my post about the ghoul leap suppression. Ahead of scores of sites focused on macros, ahead of wowwiki, dedicated DK sites, and even the o-bards.

Since Wrath was released, my readership sits between 400 and 600 visits a day, without ever getting linked by the big names (EJ or WoWInsider). All of the additional visits come from search engines, mostly Google.

Worth it? Well, I don’t have advertisements on the site, but I still like the fact that my posts are being read, so I’d say yes, it’s definitely worth it for me.

Setting Up

First thing first. Before anything else, make sure your blog is actually allowing search engines. On WordPress, it’s under Settings -> Privacy. Blogger definitely has that setting as well, under Settings->Basic->Let Search Engines find your blog. Others? You tell me :)

Second, make sure your blog is known and recognized by Google. Blogger users have a slight advantage over others here as they will be included in some capacity even if they do nothing beyond changing the privacy settings. Nonetheless, start by visiting Google Webmaster Central and follow the Submit your content to Google procedure. Next, sign in to webmaster tools, and authenticate your site. Webmaster tools aren’t really good for a lot of things as much of the information is stale, inaccurate or way too plentiful to be of any practical use, but the diagnostics page can point out a couple of interesting elements to check and fix. Among these, keywords and meta descriptions.

For WordPress users, a good way to improve drastically the context of your posts – that is, providing some additional information to search engines to help them catalog your posts, or in other words, to give them some clues what your post is about, is to grab the plug-in All-in-One-SEO Pack.

The reason you want to use and configure this plugin is simple, it gives you a simple and handy way to edit meta keywords and descriptions for all your posts, which will appear as an additional set of fields in your edit post page. The settings are pretty self-explanatory, but basically you will want to fill in some generic recurring elements (like “world of warcraft” for the home keywords”) in there at the very least, for the general context of what you’re writing about.

In the post editor page, under the All in One SEO Pack menu you will have an opportunity to enter some specific keywords and a short description of what the page is about. Note that while not all search engines will use these, they are better filled in than left out. Descriptions should ideally have between 80 and 160 characters (more might get ignored, less are flagged as “short descs” by Google) and should be unique for each post.

Next, a very important element, the post slug, or permalinks – in short the url under which an individual post can be reached. Blogger users have little in terms of options here but in your Settings->Archive Settings make sure you have Enable Post Pages active. This is important so that the search engines index each post individually instead of just an ever-changing front-page where whatever search results fall off every 10 posts or so.

For WordPress users, you have many different choices in how to configure permalinks, under Settings->Permalinks. There are many schools of thought about permalinks, but one of the most basic one is to make sure these actually add to search visibility. That is, your permalink should be explicit and probably reflect your post title. The default setting in WordPress (both self-hosted and on WordPress.com) is to a simple numerical value. This is bad, as the numbers not only aren’t telling any story at all, but if for whatever reason you migrate your database the posts may get re-numbered, and all search results pointing to any specific posts will end up in a wrong place. You could further improve visibility by making the permalink text a rephrased version of your post title. For the rest, there are divergent opinions of what else should be part of the permalinks – just the post’s name, or the full date, just the month or just the year. The majority opinion seems to be the shorter the better (so no dates at all or just the year), but full dates are quite popular on some SEO trendsetters’ own blogs as well. As long as the permalinks are explicit, you’d probably have to work at Google to know which of the other options are best.

Last but not least, to improve the search engine’s knowledge of your blog’s content, you will want to generate a sitemap. The best way to do that is to use the Google XML Sitemap plugin. Once you create your sitemap, make sure to go back to Webmaster Central and link to the sitemap from here. As you will see in the plugin’s settings, you would be well advised at that stage to also follow through with the other search engines, use their own webmaster tools and make sure the sitemaps are registered there as well.

Duplicate Content? We don’t need no duplicate content!

In general and due to years of abuse by spammers and black hat SEOs, search engines will penalize duplicated content. The problem here is that WordPress in particular is very generous in the way people can access an individual post: by its permalink, by its category (../category/MyCategoryname/permalink)  and by its tags (../tag/MyTagName/permalink). A post in two categories will therefore appear in Google’s index at least thrice: by it’s own normal permalink, Category 1 and Category 2. This is bad because Google is said to penalize all results on the theory that it may actually be spam posted all over the web. If you use tags, you can add one additional individual result per tag, which will rapidly dilute the value of your post the more tags you’re using. Last but not least, WordPress 2.7 has added comment pagination, which means you may end up with your normal post’s permalink duplicated with permalink/comment-page-#/ by search engines. Not good.

The best way to fix that is twofold: For most search engines, noindex directives to categories and tag archives will be honoured. The simplest way to implement that is to use a plugin called Robots Meta, it’s configuration is still pretty straightforward. Google is however pretty bad at honouring noindex and nofollow directives, so for these guys, you’ll want to make sure the following is set in your robots.txt file (create this one at the root of your blog’s path, eg altitis.treehuggers.info):

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /tag/
Disallow: /comment-page

This will simply prevent Googlebot, the automated scanning engine, to access all links containing these three elements, and sort the issue.

We’re doing it with Style!

Last but not least, remember the good old html heading tags, <h1> to <h5>? Since the advent of CSS, they have often become underused, but in terms of search visibility, that’s probably a mistake. Headings are important as they give additional context, so do use them properly to provide a clear hierarchy to your content. Again, there are a couple of options available to you, but roughly, you should decide how you will build up your blog’s brand. Is each individual post the key element you want to promote? Make sure your post title is styled with <h1> tags. Is your blog’s name the brand you want to promote? Make your blog name a <h1> tag and your individual posts <h2> tags. Everything else should have a lower heading that these, your posts however should probably not be lower than <h2>.

Content is King

Beyond the above basic technical measures, there are almost as many tricks and methods as there are SEO specialists. Whether to investigate the field further for a hobby WoW blog is worth the time or not is up to each individual blogger, but you can easily get lost in the wealth of additional stuff to do (popular things include link-building and the realtively new but still not proven pagerank sculpting, for instance). That being said, the best way to have a good search visibility remains to simply write quality content matching the purpose of your blog. The better your posts, the more people will read it, comment on it or comment about it. In the end, a trackback from your blogging peers will remain a high-value testimonial to the quality, relevance, importance or wittiness of your writings, and no amount of additional SEO techniques can replace that.

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Altitis Reskin for Winter / DK

Here’s the other little project, a new template for Altitis – or rather just a simple re-skinning of the previous one. I still pretty much like the quite simple layout I had since late Summer, I just grew bored of the colour scheme.

Thanks to WordPress’ child theme functionality, the reskin was a matter of mere minutes, in fact the long part was the graphic work dabbling.

Tell me what you don’t like about it if you want it changed :)

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I’m Alive, Damnit!

Matticus writes about dead WoW Blogs. I’m not dead. I was on vacation, remember?

And since Steptoe actually suddenly reappeared, I’m also back in the game and made level 54 (first level in a month or so) on my mage. Funny thing, by the way. One month without playing and you need to relearn all of the controls. I had a similar feeling a bit before going on vacation while playing a couple of AVs on my paladin trying to get the Olympics pet (and failing because horde actually lost all 4 games I was in, go figure).

Mentioning Steptoe… You remember Steptoe the Warlock, right? He wasn’t just my 2007 arena buddy, he was also my willing accomplice throughout the first TBC year, my lieutenant who tried to keep me from failing to run a guild and then bolted off Ghostlands (EU) to other places where the grass wasn’t greener but the BG queues only took half a second.

Back in January, we were getting our arses handed to us in Season 3, and after a particularly embarrassing hilarious match during which we played so badly that a team of nekkid arena dancers could have beaten us, Steptoe cut short on our cheering and told me “BRB, going for a smoke” (yes, as a warlock he has some very filthy habits. Consorting with demons and tabagism are only the tip of the iceberg, believe me). And that was the last time I heard from him until he suddenly reappeared in the comments section here.

And on Dragonmaw EU, too. Only he apparently has seen the light or something, because Steptoe the Warlock has morphed into Steptoe the Priest.

I know what you’re thinking. From warlock to shadow priest, the only filthy habit being shed is the demon consorting because they sure do a lot of dabbling in the dark arts. And that would be a perfectly reasonable thought, since everyone + dog levels priest as a tenbraic disciple of unholiness.

Like me, you’d be perfectly wrong. My bloody contrarian buddy is levelling as…

…holy.

I kid you not. He has embraced the Light as tightly as he was hugging the shadows before, and I suspect the only reason which prevented him from becoming a zealous paladin instead of a squishy robe-wearer was one year of playing together with the most rotten paladin role model you could have. Me. Oh, and the fact that he noticed I took about 4 times as long to kill anything at 70 than his warlock, but I digress.

Will there be an improbable but equally hilarious priest / mage 2v2 duo making a fool of itself to be formed at level 70? I doubt it, chances are that Wrath will be out before I make it to 70 on that mage. As a matter of fact, if the new and improved Wrath Paladin becomes easier to level that his Burning Predecessor, I’ll throw my previous prejudices in the wind and roll another one.

So if you’re suddenly looking forward to more tales of arena bungling on Altitis because Steptoe has finally finished his cigarette, you’ll be disappointed. Nonetheless, welcome back, buddy.

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Summertime ’08 Means Altitis is Offline

Just a quick heads-up, I’ll be off on two weeks of vacation with my family, and not taking any ‘net connection with me.

So I won’t be phyiscally dead, only in terms of the online world.

See you all in September.

Gwaendar

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Right Now: Altitis Tops on Google for Altitis

This is actually the first time this has happened in over a year of existence: Altitis is currently google’s top search result for… altitis.

SERP for Altitis

Yes, it’s a silly self-congratulatory post. I’m still proud :)

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Yes, it’s That Time Again. Theme Change Time.

So the Summer theme will have been quite short-lived, but I actually recently realized it was completely and horribly borked in IE7. And I started growing pretty tired of the header with horde and alliance logos around.

Which means that rather than trying to tweak stuff around to make it fit for IE7 consumption, I just started over with something a bit different.

Oh, of course, it’s not exactly a departure from my usual spartan theme design (read: I still couldn’t do decent graphic stuff to save my life), but here you go. New theme. Shazam or something.

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Tobold on Story-Telling in MMORPGs

At the risk of being accused again of being a closet roleplayer (full disclosure: there’s no closet. I was a pen & paper roleplayer in my teens, I have fond memories both as a player and GM of these times, and that probably also explains why I spend most of my computer gaming in RPGs), here’s a heads-up on Tobold’s post about story-telling in MMORPGs, which I highly recommend.

Tying into this are the dev’s hints that in Wrath of the Lich King, the Arthas storyline will become pervasive through 70 to 80. While it remains to be seen how this will turn out, Tobold nails one of the most important aspects: a new entertainment medium reaches maturity when it becomes supported by solid story-telling and a compelling, immersing narrative.

MMORPGs are certainly about the most difficult medium today to create such storylines: their open-ended nature, the relative freedom of player character development, and most importantly, the inherent challenge of inserting a relatively static story inside a persistent world contribute to that difficulty.

After all, compelling stories are based on the suspension of disbelief, and that becomes more difficult when you level your second toon and are tasked to exterminate the very same threat you had wiped out on your previous playthrough.

In a game with a world as vast as WoW, there is physical room to create branching and expanding stories allowing for multiple paths, multiple character developments and multiple endings. This kind of story-telling is constrained by the fact that groups of players find themselves not only at different advancement stages of a story arc, but also in different branches. This probably explains why the currently available prototypes of what proper storytelling could become are very limited and have little effect in the grand scheme of things: picking factions like the Gelkis vs the Magram or Aldor vs. Scryers gives access to specific, diverging quests but they currently have only limted impact in the overall game progression.

WoW set a new industry standard in terms of gameplay and polish for MMORPGs. While the introduction of a long-term, over-reaching storyline with Wrath would be a welcome addition, the MMORPG setting the new standard in terms of story-telling has probably not yet been designed. It serves not only as a reminder that the MMORPG genre is still young, but also as a promise that the best is yet to come.

Source: Tobold on Story-telling in MMORPGs

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Accessing a WordPress Blog’s Comment Feed

Have you ever been reading a blog post, posted a comment and wanted to keep an eye on what other people had to say? And been frustrated that there’s no apparent way to subscribe to the comments to avoid re-visiting over and over to check for replies?

On WordPress, you have an option to subscribe to every post’s individual comment feed built into the code. While not all WordPress themes actually provide a link to the feed, you can still subscribe very easily:
Take the post’s url (or permalink), add feed/ at the end and your browser should now offer you the normal syndication subscription options you’re used to.

For instance to subscribe to this post, you’d simply browse to http://altitis.treehuggers.info/2008/06/02/accessing-wordpress-blogs-comment-feed/feed/ and then follow up on all comments posted in your feed reader.

This works both with self-hosted WordPress blogs and WordPress.com hosted blogs.

For self-hosted bloggers, if you want to add the link to a post’s feed into your template, you will have to edit single.php in your theme files, and insert the following piece of code in there, probably in the post metadata section:

<?php post_comments_feed_link('RSS 2.0'); ?>

Simple as that.

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