Happy new year!

Hi all,

I’m a little busy with new year, buying a cat for my kids, and other housey stuff, so will do some more posting in the new year! Hope you’re all well and happy.

There was a great set of questions from Vigan on Frost tanking, which I’ll get to next. I just answered one about necrosis.

The traffic from 3.3 was fairly insane, more than doubled the hits here, peaked at 64K hits in a week instead

[ continue reading...]

Settled

I’m now in my new house, got ADSL2+ going, decent wireless coverage, and a horrible work laptop to game on. Better than my last one (Lenovo T60), which constantly overheated and turned itself off. It’s great to be home in Oz, I’m really happy.

My proper gaming PC should arrive mid-January from the UK, along with our bed (so we won’t be on a sofa bed anymore) and I’ll be able to raid again. Hopefully will have picked up

[ continue reading...]

Moving

Hi all, I’m moving back home so will be in transit and settling down until around Dec 5th.

Don’t expect I’ll be able to post much til then.

Update: international move done, recovered from jet lag, planning on blogging again from the 8th. Looking forward to 3.3!

Mobile readers

If you read pwnwear from a mobile device, you will like the new system I’ve implemented which renders it into a simpler and much faster site.

There’s a slight bug for some devices which means the home page doesn’t show up in the mobilePress way. Other pages within it detect the browser device and render as it should.

To get around this on your phone, bookmark and navigate to this url instead:

http://pwnwear.com/?mobile or link

Another way to read

[ continue reading...]

Disabled SEO comments and more

I just deactivated the plugin I’d been using for a while, SEO Comments. It contributed 1% of my total traffic over the measured period, which is good, but… the bounce rate on those visitors was a lot higher than for other search visitors (nearly 90% vs 65%), and I didn’t like the impact on the UI. I tracked these stats with google adsense, which lets you use a segment as a filter on all its reports.

The plugin

[ continue reading...]

Five months of pwnwear, 200 blogs since

Just noticed it’s been five months since I started this blog. I see that since then, about 200 blogs on WoW have been launched and announced themselves at blog azeroth. I wish them every success and hope the writers enjoy the journey as much as I have.

Isn’t that an awful lot though? 200 in five months.

WoW is a remarkable game in the way it has created an entire industry around itself.

There are the mega sites which earn an income like wow.com, curse.com and wowhead.com along with their subsidiary sites since Zam and Curse are corporations with a network of sites, and wow.com is owned by AOL.

There are some long-term writers like Galoheart, Honors, Matticus and others who still play WoW and still blog. » continue reading

New sidebar navigation

I hope finding articles is a lot easier with this new sidebar navigation system I’ve put in. Let me know. I think it might be a bit in-your-face orange, there’s a grey theme too.

I also tidied up my categories a bit so there won’t be duplicate content in two Tanking subcategories; though a tank article might also appear in a Raid or Leadership category.

Find by theme now, too

Lastly, got a new ‘find by theme/ tag’

[ continue reading...]

Tweaked sidebar

I added a “most commented recent posts” sidebar item, and re-activated avatars on the “recent comments” sidebar. Ajax Edit Comments recently released a new version which I’ve installed; seems to be a better UI overall. Lastly, thanks to Chev who pointed out my sliding notes weren’t working, I’ve fixed that too.

Let me know if you see any performance/speed degradation; showing that many avatars can slow the site while it retrieves them from hosts.

Too much pwnage

My site was down for about 8 hours today for a bitter-sweet reason: it’s using too much of the shared host’s resources. That’s because the site’s getting more traffic (well, when it’s suspended from high CPU usage, it doesn’t get any traffic…), but that’s just 20K pageviews a week. I’m surprised, since really that’s not much at all.

I’ll probably upgrade the plan again and more importantly will review my wordpress plugins to see if there are any settings

[ continue reading...]

Long weekend

I’m having a long weekend abroad so you won’t see new posts until Wed 21st. The ‘add link’ button within comments now works, and also I added a Twitter option there so other readers can look you up; great for active bloggers who comment here. Hope you’re all well, talk soon!

Index page fixed

Bugs which broke listings for some categories on my index page are resolved. It now shows recent 10 for all categories, as intended.

Scheduled maintenance and other changes

  • Thursday 2AM – 3AM CST (07:00 – 08:00GMT) there will be possible downtime at pwnwear.
  • I have disabled the voting  system for content. It just wasn’t being used enough so I didn’t like the ‘zero votes’ everywhere. In the last 27 days, there were just 60 votes from ~20000 unique visitors.
  • The Index page has been revamped so it’s actually useful now.
  • Ads now appear for readers coming from a search engine, unless they’re a regular reader or

    [ continue reading...]

Sideblog for news

I’ve installed a ’sideblog’ which means this news won’t end up in an RSS feed, and nor on the front page of my site, but instead hidden away in the sidebar. Still lets me update you on improvements I’m making to pwnwear, without having to bog down the important content.

Ads should now be working for visitors who come from a search engine or who have seen less than a couple of pages in the last ten days. Therefore,

[ continue reading...]

Site news

Monday: my site’s back up! Comments enabled again.

Over the weekend my hosting provider was moving pwnwear to a new server, so there was downtime. It’s very disappointing for me that the site’s been unavailable or I had comments disabled over the whole weekend. They had complications with the move.

Other changes:

  • I have got a formatting UI working in comments again, which is nice, only the URL link button within it doesn’t work (yet)
  • Swapped to a smaller

    [ continue reading...]

Site news

I’ve implemented a few changes to the site.

Please let me know if you notice any adverse effects, like pictures or pages loading more slowly, or whatnot. » continue reading

How to destroy a guild

Quick funny post. The random guild I joined on my new realm. I log on one day to see the most ridiculous GMOTD, from the now former GM Panzer. You can see it in the picture.

Notice who is the new GM.

Right. The guy who left the guild, the former GM, put his alt as placeholder GM.

Guild doesn’t have much future, right, if the GM abandons it without a successor (deliberately? stupidly?) and instead

[ continue reading...]

pwnwear news, and reading from a mobile or iphone

I notice a few readers coming in on iphones or other mobile devices. If you have trouble reading the body text because of the new wide banners on the right, just subscribe, get a mobile RSS reader and use RSS instead.

Works really well, since it removes the widgets on the side, but still has full content.

Other pwnwear news

I have added tags to every post here now, so you can navigate using tags (they’re like themes or

[ continue reading...]

European hello and switchers

I have some readers from France and Spain, just going to say hello courtesy of translation software. (update: HAHAHA oh my, that software is terrible! I’ll leave it in so the native speakers can laugh. Do a reverse translation if you’d like to see what a botched job it did.)

Ceci est un merci rapides et bonjour à mes lecteurs français. Je souhaite que je pourrais parler du français ! Ma boîte de femme.

Quiero saludar mis lectores españoles. Yo no he visitado España, pero querría a un día.

This is topical because I’ve been living in the UK for nearly two years now. We are moving back home to Australia in December for various reasons, so I had to work out what to do about raiding.

I love WoW, and I’ve played it since launch, so will keep playing when I get back. That was not a decision, it was about off-hours versus a reroll. » continue reading

Switch to our mobile site