The WoW Human Test

So how does a Dranei pass "the human test?"

Typical:
You know the Human test - you're posting a comment to a blog ... maybe even this blog... but you're faced with a captcha which looks something like this:

The purpose of the captcha is to make sure that when you comment on a blog you're not a spam-bot program but instead a living, breathing humanoid (or in the case of the Undead - previously living and breathing). You have to type in whatever letters and/or numbers are skewed in the little picture or else it determines you're a program devoid of eyes with which to see the swirly word maelstrom.

By the way, according to these programs I've been identified as an electronic bot only slightly less often then Google has determined I should cut back on the caffeine to improve my typing:



Moving on...

WoW-Perfect:
Mystic Chicanery, however, has de-biased the "human" test in their blog.

Now, every WoW Race from Booty Bay to the Undercity has a shot at passing the test without having to worry about the need to keep up on "human" culture.

Some examples: (You would just have to do one, the others are for example only.)

There remains, however, the need for those pesky eyes... although a number of Elves seem to be making do with just some glowy sockets...

Anyway, bravo to Mystic Chicanery.
I hope you don't mind I was in your blog, screen-shotting your security words.

New Banners

I've been updating the home page for the blog from the old-Blogger's "Template" to the new-Blogger's "Layout" mode. The end result should look very similar, maybe a little cleaner. I've been trying out some new banners, here are a few:

My favorite so far:


Runner Ups:


Also Rans:






And just a little too disturbing:


Oh, and uh, yeah, well... I may be trying out some Google Adsense on the home page, which may, or may not, advertise some gold sellers, so uh, yeah, I'm possibly a little selling out, or not, depending on if there are clicks involved; I'm just saying...

Apology Accepted

Ready to be shocked again?

Yesterday I mentioned that I found someone copying a few of my posts word for word. My response was to nicely ask (via one or two comments on the copied posts) that they not repost my blog but simply provide a link.

I hoped for, but frankly did not expect, a positive result. But I got it. The (previously) offending blog has:

• deleted the posts (and others that I saw were copied) and
• apologized in the comments to my post yesterday.

Well, I couldn't really ask for more. Thanks for the apology and thanks for fixing the posts. I really appreciate it.

I'm Worthy of being Copied?

Well, much to my ongoing shock someone has deemed my posts worthy of stealing. This picture shows a side by side of one example:

Same wording. Same pictures. Same dorky sayings. /boggle. They even used, in the example pictured above, a post at my most utterly and categorically pathetic. I mean seriously, you used a picture of me in my all green gear (oh yeah, and the Blue Demonslayer) talking about how I had such a hard time getting to this trainer and then found out she could only train me in a few more things. (Original Post from the example.)

Oh well. I see they took from other (frankly worthier) people as well. They reposted this post from wow.qj.net (I don't know anything about them), this post from Engadget, and this post from wowinsider - although I noticed they replaced the picture. There's probably many many more.

They didn't take all my posts, just a select few (8 so far), but more keep getting copied each day. It appears to be the blog of a European Guild, that frankly has a really cool WoW-Photoshopped picture or two on its home page. But of course given the pattern of reposting other people's content, I begin to doubt they did those pictures.

So for now, I'm just nicely posting in their comments the request not to copy my content but to link to my posts instead. Eventually I may have to pull a Gitr but before I do, I'm hoping they'll realize that in blogging if you like a post, you link to it rather than copy it word for word and picture for picture. Or even quote part of it and provide a link to the rest.

WoW Blog Widgets

If you're ever in the market to make your own WoW Blog there are a couple of World of Warcraft oriented widgets you might want to consider adding to your site. Admittedly I have probably gone a little overboard with a few but as an html newb it's fun to experiment.

Here are some that I've found:

Thottbot Search Box. Begin a search of Thottbot from your site.

WoW Break's News feed. I removed this one when we hadn't had any news for a while but I still keep it on my private homepage.

At Tales of a WoW Addict I saw a new widget I just added for WoWHead.

Your del.icio.us tagrolls (You can see several of these down the sidebars of the home page - Links for WoW Enchanting, WoW Fishing, etc..)

Or Your del.icio.us Link Cloud which I don't use on this site but on my private homepage

Blizzard used to have a download kit for Fan Sites on the worldofwarcraft.com page but for the life of me I can't find it again. I was able to find a mirror for it here. This is where I got the disclaimer language I have at the bottom of this blog's homepage. The wow-europe site, however, still has an easy to find link to their fan-site program which interestingly listed a requirement I had never seen before - being updated at least weekly.

Search-WoW is a website I was just shown where you can search several websites at once for WoW information - They have a widget you can add as well.

Adsense - Although not a World of Warcraft oriented item, it does have a special relationship with a World of Warcraft blog. Because any WoW Blogger who puts up adsense will have to contend with Gold Selling ads because Adsense reads the words on your site and matches it to Advertisers who pay to advertise on sites with those words. Apparently gold-sellers are the only advertisers who know anything about WoW.



There are several ways to handle this issue:

• Go nogold and don't list any gold selling services on your site
• Embrace the gold selling, put that Adsense on there and let the pennies-per-click roll in.
• Adventures with Play addresses the issue with a disclaimer at the end of each post (click the link and scroll down for an example) addressed to the great Google-bots and asks for relevant ads for computers or such.
• wowwiki and wowinsider blacklist gold sellers but I wonder how possible it would be to keep up without a team of people on it.

Others:
I know there are more out there, for example, Frostbolt uses an Allakhazam tool to give mouse over information for loot he's picked up. Definitely a worthwhile blog tool.

For Non-Bloggers:

Thottbot has some Plugins for anyone to add to their browser:
(linked via Thottbot's Home Page under "Misc" "Plugins" - includes plugins to Firefox and Internet Explorer v. 7.

Wowhead also has Plugins.

Blizzard also has some Downloads including a Desktop theme designed for Windows XP.

Update 10/3/2007:
Also consider widgets from WoWBlues

300 Posts!

Casual WoW is now on the new version of Blogger. A nice improvement. Blogger is a great blogging platform because it's free, easy and it hosts its own pictures. However it had a couple of drawbacks. One of them was the lack of post categories. But the new version allows for them via "labels" and I've been updating the old posts. Please bear with me if it kicks up a bunch of new posts in the RSS feeds.

Post Labels
The good news is that now if you see a post you like, you can see others like it by clicking on the label. For example, click to see past posts about Videos, Commercial Breaks or WoW Tourism.

(Another problem with Blogger is/was the inconsistent reliability of loading pictures. I think I've figured out that this was because I was loading HUGE .png files. Since I've switched to smaller .jpg files it's been much easier. )

Post Count
An interesting side note is that this new version also showed me that we hit 300 posts! In fact, the last post of 2007, just before I took a break from posting was the 300th post. Woot!

Allowing Anonymous Comments

Oh and one more thing. I've enjoyed reading the few comments I've gotten so far so I thought I'd try allowing anonymous comments. There will still be the human test and comment moderation but now you don't have to have a blogger account. Hopefully the first two measures will still be enough to block the comment spam.

Although if you did create your own account you could add a picture to your comments or create your own blog. (Read this first about cancelling your account.) I know, I know, this all would be much more appealing if I didn't just complain about the picture loading problem.

Want to know what leaving a comment is like?
Here's the preview: How do I leave comments on a blog?
And you can include some simple HTML as outlined here.

Blog Name Change

Okay, a brief bit of history.

I started playing World of Warcraft with the friends I had gained in Star Wars Galaxies (SWG). We all came to WoW together. But we later went different ways due to different play styles.

So I thought I could change the purpose of the blog (originally intended to be CasualWoW) to be a vehicle for us all to keep playing differently but still post about our experiences and laugh about them together. (We had done this via email previously.) So I renamed it.

All Your Blog Are Belong To Us
I named it All Your Blog because it reminded me of the fun times we had in SWG, where I first saw the term. We had five Imperial Bases that we defended in our guild. (Yes, I actually engaged in PVP back in the day.) When we started adding player housing someone named their house "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US." I thought it was hysterical. (I also thought it had to do with our bases. It didn't.) One of my kind friends explained it to me. (Read about the origin on Wikipedia.)

The name seemed appropriate because:

I love a good snowclone

It reminded me of the good times I was trying to preserve (recreate?) from SWG

It was intended to literally be a Blog about Us

But alas, the idea was a bust. No interest. Yet I still clung to the name. I think, though, that after 9 months it's time to give up. I'm going back to "Casual WoW." It is more to the spirit of what the blog is about. You should be seeing the name change slowly pop up on the site, on the feed, etc...


Old Name: ALL YOUR BLOG ARE BELONG TO US
New Name: Casual WoW

Blog Back Office

What's Coming:
At some point over the next few weeks I will be tweaking the blog's back office. In the end it shouldn't be much different. However, in case I break the feed or such I wanted to give readers a head's up. If you suddenly stop seeing posts, don't worry, I haven't gone AWOL.

Here's what I'm planning (more a list for my benefit):

• Merge all feeds (e.g. Atom) into the feedburner feed (In this attempt I am most likely to break the feed)
• The above should also provide some stability to the pictures that I noticed aren't showing up in bloglines
• Add a site meter
• Contemplate a Blog Name Change
• Turn some of the NPC Commercial Breaks into Parody Ads in the sidebars
• Contemplate an email service (by subscription)
• Add an icon or image to the Feedburner Feed
• Review the Feed Flare on the Feedburner Feed

What I've Already Done:
Have you noticed these updates already on the Blog Homepage?

• A link to The WorldofWarcraft Blog Store which is a collection of World of Warcraft Products available at Amazon (also pops up items from your wishlist if you have one)
• Constantly updating News on the World of Warcraft and The Burning Crusade from wowbreak.com

In the meantime anyone who doesn't use the Feedburner Feed may wish to subscribe to it now: Subscribe. Want to know more about feeds? Check out this post.

Thanks for being patient with me if things go haywire.

p.s. If I see problems I'll reset everything by the beginning of October.