Take My Word For It

While trying to explore all of Eastern Kingdoms today, I got pwned by a terrain glitch in World of Warcraft.

As you can see from the picture above, I was stuck in a hole that I could not jump out of. I had to wait for a GM to help me out of there. I waited there for about two hours. I don’t have much else to say about this, but I felt that this needed to be seen on the blog.

While waiting for a GM, NFreak and I watched “Land of the Lost” with Will Ferrell. He was there. Seriously, I know him. We are best buds. The movie was hilarious, and everyone out there should watch it sometime.

Loddeykins Life Movies, World of Warcraft

Depending on how you refer to an “All Nighter”, I may or may not have pulled one off. It’s about 8 a.m. where I live right now, and after a good 8 hours of non-stop work on the new website, I think that it’s time for me to get some rest.

Maybe when I wake up I will take a day off with all of this website work and just chill out and play World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy IV DS. Either way, it could be an exciting day if I don’t spend the entire time programming.

Nonetheless, I have gotten a HUGE amount of work done with the new website, including a request panel to keep track of your own requests that you have chosen to take. At the rate I’m going right now, it could be completely finished within a week or two, but ya’ never know. I tend to program in spurts; one week I’m programming things, and the next week I am playing with the things that other people have programmed.

It’s quite an exciting life… Good night folks!

NFreak Programming Programming, World of Warcraft

I spent the past six hours working on the new World of Warcraft website. There is now a few extra pages for members that are logged in, and there isn’t too much more that needs to be done in terms of launching a BETA.

This is all meaningless to most people who read this blog, but since it is *MY* blog, I figured it would be appropriate for me to let everyone know what I have been up to. Logged in members can now view a list of submitted requests and choose to accept them. Furthermore, once accepted, they also have the option to drop them (in case they realize they don’t have the time or knowledge to make the article).

Cron jobs have also been placed to reset daily page views, logins, and time online, and the user profile page is finally complete. Check it out, let me know, and maybe I can improve on it. The ability to actually create articles is still lacking, but there are a lot of dependencies when creating articles, and so there are things that I have to get done first before jumping to that piece of the project.

The next thing I plan on doing with the site is to make a page to manage the requests that you have accepted, showing which articles you signed up to write, and displaying how much time is left before the request expires. Not the most exciting of pages, but something completely necessary, so I might as well get it out of the way soon.

I said I’d keep you updated, and that’s exactly what I’m doing.

NFreak World of Warcraft Programming, World of Warcraft

Let’s keep this one short.

My plans for tomorrow are to finish the settings page for the new World of Warcraft Information Database. Once the settings page is complete, then I can begin work on the actual article-making page, and possibly make the website functional for a BETA opening. The quicker that I can launch this website, the better.

There is a lot more work to be done before it is fully complete, but I think that investing extra time in minor details will be worth it in the long run, as I would like the final product to be very intricate and extensive in design and functionality.

Remember, registration is complete, so you are free to open up your account and test out some of the features that can’t be accessible without being logged in. Take a look and let me know what you think I can improve on.

More to come.

EDIT: The settings page is complete. Took a few hours, but it’s done and over with. No more tedious programming, and the fun shall commence.

NFreak World of Warcraft World of Warcraft

Today I finally dished out some extra cash to purchase the latest expansion in the World of Warcraft online RPG. As I am writing this, the game is currently being downloaded and installed, and is likely going to take another hour. I made the purchase so that I could further support my upcoming World of Warcraft Information Database website, which I plan on launching in the coming months.

I don’t have much to say on the expansion right now, as my highest leveled character is currently only 61, meaning that I won’t even be able to explore Northrend, and will be limited to the inscription profession and the Death Knight class. I would like to reach Northrend within the next month, and maybe even launch the new website alongside it; that’s my goal.

This blog has also been receiving a lot of my attention, as adding content on a semi-daily basis is always a good idea for all search engines, and I would really like to reach out to more people in general. I will keep you updated!

This images was taken with my Nintendo DSi, so that gives you an idea of the quality it has.

NFreak World of Warcraft MMORPG, World of Warcraft

Both the registration page and the login page are complete for the new website found at the World of Warcraft Information Database. It looks beautiful so far, but I have still not found a good ‘.com’ name for it yet.

The next page I have to do is the “My Settings” page, where you can change your password, preferences, and other details which you entered upon creating your account. As soon as that is finished, then maybe I can get into the article writing, which would make it functional to some extent, meaning I could launch the site with a big BETA across the logo, perhaps giving bonuses to members who sign-up during that period.

Anyways, check out the new website and create your account. No email verification is required. Let me know what you think of it so far, and if you have any ideas, post ‘em here!

P.S.
I know the right column of the site is static right now, as it’s just for testing purposes. Once I get some articles in the database I can start tweaking the list of articles that appear on the right. I’m thinking of a list of recently created articles, a list of related articles to the one you are currently viewing, and maybe random articles. If a user does a search, it could possibly add the results of that search to that right column so it doesn’t interrupt what they are currently reading.

NFreak World of Warcraft World of Warcraft

I found this cool web tool to make the images I post look nicer, so check it out:

I am not sure how often I will be using this nifty tool, as it is a bit tedious just to post a single image, and it isn’t too fancy. I may look into using Lightbox instead. There’s only one way to find out if BritePic is the thing for me, so I’ll give it a try.

Let’s leave it at that.

NFreak Changes Updates, World of Warcraft

Before I begin, I’ll refresh your memory on what the site bot actually is. If you go here you can see a page which lists some random statistics about what the site bot has found. This was a project I made that recursively searched all of NFreak.net to find all the pages, and all links to other pages on those pages.

If anyone wants the source code to use for their own website (it’s very simple to setup), just comment and let me know. The bot was used as an attempt to calculate my own PageRank so I could see where the site was lacking in link structure. I never got as far as the PageRank calculation, as it took about a month for the bot to finish searching the site as a whole.

You might notice that it says .10% of the site is remaining to be searched, but that is because the way it’s coded, it would never finish. It finds a page, then it goes to every link on that page, so the project kept growing in percentage rather than decreasing for the first week or so. That .10% is probably entirely duplicate content that would never get flushed away because of the constant finding of new, repetitive links.

In the future, I might expand on this project, making a more user-friendly view to it, so people can see which pages were the most linked to, (obviously the home page of the site would be number one, as it is found linked at the top of every page of the site). By seeing which pages were linked to most often, that would give us an idea of how Google sees the website, and why certain pages of the site are listed higher than others on the search engine.

This is all just a project I began in my free time, which I demoed to the development team that I am currently working for, so it had more of a purpose than what it was originally meant for. As of now, I am dedicating most of my programming time to the new World of Warcraft website, but once that frees up I may continue with the bot. So for the record, the bot project is officially on hold, but I will be sure to let you know if it makes another appearance.

Oh, Botty… we’ll miss you.

NFreak Site Statistics Bot, World of Warcraft

So you might be wondering what I’ve been up to lately. I decided to check in, and while sifting through over 2,000 spam comments I found some important ones that were actually legitimate. This made me realize the importance of the blog, as I was unsure of how popular it actually was.

In order to post a comment to the blog, your IP address must first be approved by Wordpress. I have to do this manually, which is to ensure that spambots don’t get through and post dozens of links to unrelated sites in a sad attempt to gain Google PageRank.

Speaking of Google PageRank, our site has finally hit the charts. For the longest time, www.nfreak.net (our domain name) was listed as PR N/A. That is different than PageRank 0 (much worse, in fact), and it made me think that the site was sandboxed by Google, which is a penalty that Google uses to prevent websites from exchanging links and gaining a top spot on the search engine results page (SERPs) as a result. Anyways, we jumped from a despicable PR N/A to a respectable PR 1 for many of our pages. That is very rewarding to me, as I spent a lot of time optimizing the site for Google, and getting rid of many pages that were no longer used, fixing some duplicate content issues, etcetera.

Now let’s get to the main point of this entry in the blog, which has to do with a World of Warcraft website that I have been working on for the past few weeks. I have been working as a web designer/programmer for my university for a little while now, and I have learned a lot of new design techniques in this short time. I am moving away from using tables to form the layout of the website, as I was ignorant for so long about the div tag. The World of Warcraft Information Database is the title of the new website which I plan on launching shortly, and so far the template is complete, along with a few extra pages (such as registration).

So you wanna check it out? Finally being released for public viewing is the World of Warcraft Information Database. There is not really much content at the moment, but I am very proud of the template I formed. Take a look, and comment below to let me know what you think of it. Currently, registration is complete, but the login page is only about halfway finished. You can login, but there is no user panel or any extra features to the site that are available. I have been working rapidly on the site, so by the time this is being read that may very well have changed.

How is it different from other WoW websites? It is very similar to a Wikipedia site, in that user’s will be able to post their own articles once logged in, but I plan on making it rewarding to those members that write articles (something that Wiki doesn’t acknowledge). Every member will make fake website currency while being logged in. It is in the same format as World of Warcraft currency (gold, silver, copper), and will be earned in several ways.

1. For every article a member posts, they will receive a set amount of copper for every letter within it.
2. They will also receive copper for every unique person that views their article.
3. Being logged in to the website will also give the user copper (time online, logins, and page views reward copper).
4. A bonus simply for registering also exists to encourage people to join.

I figured that making a leaderboard with the top authors will help encourage people to create articles, and a content-based website that writes itself should be very nice to have, even for the purpose of keeping in my portfolio for when applying to a job after college.

I still need to figure out a name for the website. I am going to go with a “.com” domain, and most of my clever ideas have already been taken. If you think you have something clever, comment and let me know. I will get back to you with updates when appropriate, and I hope you all continue to read the blog, even after my long absence.

Take care!

NFreak World of Warcraft PageRank, World of Warcraft