In another post on this site, Cataclysm and the Goblins, a commenter brought to my attention something to help with the WoWhead Tooltips thingie (WTT.) What the standard WTT does is pop up a tooltip when you hover over a WoWhead link. It’s powered by a javascript which you can place somewhere in your site/blog template (I suggest the footer area.) It’s easy, quick to install, and it works.

Unless WoWhead is down.

The script tries to connect to WoWhead and If the WoWhead servers are having problems then your site will be slower to load. Apparently WoWhead has been having the occasional issue these days, as it gets ready for Cataclysm. It’s very slow as I write this post.

So the commenter, one Mentor, mentioned an improved WTT and posted instructions on his site, here: Install WOWHead Tooltips

It’s a little more complicated than the standard WTT install and you will have to create a MySQL database in your control panel. Once you have that, you run an install program, install a plugin, add some code to your header file, and you’re good to go. It completely replaces enhances the standard tooltip usage.

The problem is that I can’t really see the point to this device. Originally I thought it would replace the WTT, but then I removed the old WTT scripts and… I just get a link. Now, it’s quite likely that I’m a boob and can’t do code to save my life, but I don’t see any tooltips on his site, either. Not with FireFox or Explorer.

I’m putting the old WoWhead javascript back, but I’ll try it in the footer and see if that helps the pages to load better.

The tooltips wiki has complete documentation if you want to check it out:

• Documentation pages
• Features – including a list of all the platforms (not just wordpress) that you can install this thing on.

Here are some links copied straight from the examples on the Wiki pages, using the code in the example. They pop the tooltip since I replaced the WTT.

• item: [Rigormortis]
• a heroic item: [Rigormortis]
• item: [Titansteel Shanker]
• blue item:[Armor of the Fang]
• green item: [Battle Seeker Chestguard]
• Achievement: [Call In The Cavalry]
• It’s supposed to call the WoWarmory, but I can’t get it to work with this character: Character data not available.

Here are some links made the old way (HTML links:)

• Rigormortis
• Heroic Rigormortis
• Titansteel shanker
• Call in the Cavalry
• Character (no tooltip here.)

hmmm… Ok, the javascript is back in and the examples are a nice purple and they do the tooltips, but the old style links aren’t colored.

After all that:

Ok, I get it, i think. (Yes, I’m slow. Shut up. ) You get the tooltips with the original WoWhead javascript and you get the pretty colors and a few options with the new Tooltips thing. The old WTT will still do the tooltip, but without the pretty colors. I like colors.

You no longer don’t have to browse WoWhead for the item URL if you already know the name of the item, achievement, or whatever. Just plug it into the new syntax and the link happens. See the documentation pages for the syntax, copy the examples, play around with them a bit, and you’ll achieve enlightenment.

You have to have both codes for all the goodies and you have to use the new syntax to get the colors and added features, it won’t happen with the HTML links. Installing the new thing will do nothing to any old WoWhead links you may have. They are all safe.

It’s installed, and it seems to work now, so I’ll keep it.

Eye of the Storm has a post on account security:

After two more guildmates got hacked last week, I decided to check and change my account security. I’ve used an authenticator since shortly after they were released, which I think is 90% of the protection that can be applied.

The other 10% is a combination of obvious email addresses, spyware, and repeated passwords for different purposes.

Here’s the rest: Account Change to Avoid Hacks

My son’s account has been hacked twice, recently. The first wasn’t so bad. They leveled his DK to 80 and he was able to get his stuff back from Blizzard. He stopped the second before any damage was done.

So we now use the authenticators and I think I may change some account data.

Amazon.com has the authenticator for $50 (!) but if you want to save a few coppers you can get yours from Blizzard for $6.50 (no, that’s not a typo.) Click here’s for the Bliz store.

It’s easy to use. You’ll connect it to your battle.net account (directions are included with the device) and then, every time you log in, you’ll be prompted for the 6 digit code the the authenticator generates. Enter that and in you go.

Happy New Year
to all of You and Yours

Regardless of race or faction affiliation or the quality of your gear!

Ok, this issue came up due to a comment I received (see below.) Here I assumed that the Guide Seller Nyhm was who I thought he claimed to be: the Video Maker Nyhm. So if it’s not the case then there’s the Nyhm who sells a set of WoW guides and there’s the Nyhm who has put together a set of cool videos, some of which I’ve posted on this blog.

I’ve sent emails to both, asking “What’s up with this?” and I’ll try again later if I don’t get a response. I’ll update this post with any replies I get. Feel free to add your comments, as well.

Nyhm of the Vids sent this comment, to this post, this morning:

B***S***!!  This is not me, i never did an interview with anyone, this is some fool still trying to sell his garbage. Im getting damn sick of this shit and im going to have to make a video putting this site and any gold selling site out of buisness once and for all.

Im done with this b***s***!

By the way, I saved the email interview. So it looks like there are the two Nyhms (and I’ve been told that this might be the case.)

Until then I’ll go through all my Nyhm posts and delete the guide references that looks like they confuse the two Nyhms and make sure that Nyhm of the Vids gets appropriate credits.

By the way…

1. Nyhm of the Vids page is here
2. Nyhm of the Guide’s page is here (and it isn’t working as I write this. edit: it works now. )

Anyone care to add anything to this?

Update: Nyhm of the Videos sent an email stating that he is not the same guy as Nyhm of the guides. So I have deleted all of the guide links, since those links were on pages with videos by Nyhm of the Videos. My bad.

Update 2: Nyhm of the Guides sent an email the stated that they are different Nyhm’s, but that they have very similar characters. WoWarmory lists nearly 100 Nyhm’s as I write this, so there seem to be a few that can lay claim to the name.

updated: edited 12/31 for grammer, etc.

By the way #1: Nyhm of the Videos has graciously agreed to an interview and I’m coming up with questions to ask, which hopefully won’t be too brain-dead. Any suggestions?

12/31: No questions have come up so you’ll have to live with mine. Ha.

By the way #2: Nyhm is not to be confused with MGM’s NIMH.

Ok, now I’m going to go play WoW for a few…

A few days back my web host punted me, suggesting that I find a new host. This was due to something crashing their servers, but as far as I can find out it wasn’t my fault and wasn’t theirs. Obviously it was the Gnomes.

So I received a backup of all my data from them and moved everything to the new host, where it actually seems to be running ok.

Umm… so where’s “The Cookbook is Back #1?”

Well, in a massive display of epic falm palming fail, I deleted the database for the blog. It was actually supposed to be the OTHER (expletives deleted) database, but there you go.

Fortunately, I was able to extract the database from the aforementioned backup file and restore everything, except “The Cookbook is Back (#1)”

So just the one post and the one comment (Sorry, Zug) is gone.

And now it’s time to get back to work. Or gaming. Or something. Maybe I’ll just watch some more 24 (via Netflix.)

As you probably have noticed the 3.0+ patches to WoW have crushed the guts out of many of our addons. Curse Gaming has a list of addons updated for the 3.0+ patches and, presumably, Wrath Ready.

Go here to browse.

edit: Some additional info on use and installing addons can be found here: WoW addons

Ever had a hard disk die? How about the one with you WoW (and/or any other MMO) data on it. How long would it take you, and how much would it cost, to get it all back?

How long would it take to download all those patches, updates, addons, reconfigure your hotkeys and other characters setups?

DominateYourServer has a detailed guide to backing up your WoW installation. Basically you copy/backup the entire WoW folder set over to your backup system and you’re good.

There are a number of choices for backing up, but none are foolproof. Do two or more if you’re really concerned (or paranoid.)

1. Install an internal hard drive and use it for backups. Just copy data from whichever drive you have your copy of WoW on over to the other drive. This is great if your main drives dies, not so good if your computer is fried (eg: by a lightning strike,) but it’s lots faster than the other methods.
2. Use an external drive. These connect with a USB cable and usually come with backup software. A bit slow, but since you can disconnect the drive after backing your system and then store it in a safe place, you’re pretty well protected.
3. DVDs (and BlueRays) are  cool, get yourself the appropriate software and burn some disks. Then store then in a safe place. DVD burners are pretty cheap, Bluray not so cheap (yet.)
4. Online backup. We use Mozy, but there are a bunch of other services available. You pick the files/folders that need to be backed up and it does it all in the background, making incremental backups on a regular basis. The first backup will take a long time since it will back up everything that you tell it to. Once that’s done then the following backups take a lot less time.
5. Go Raid. A RAID is a set of dard disks which work together. We’re interested in the mirroring function here. You set up to drives to mirror each other and then every bit of data that gets written to drive 1 also gets written to drive 2. So if one or the other fails you have a backup. I’ve seen these fail, so I suggest another backup method as well as this one. Also, this won’t backup your existing data, it’s best done with a new install.

Blizzard, as you may know, has a widget called the Authenticator. This is a hardware device that makes it very difficult to have you account hacked.

ExNovis has a write-up about it and answers the “Yes, but is it really secure?” question:

So the Blizzard Authenticator is back on sale, even after a day of being sold out. This time, it’s available in more countries and it looks like Blizzard understood there would be a huge demand for them. I bought one for myself, and for my partner, Cantara. Sometimes, I get teased from people about ‘wasting money on a device that doesn’t provide total security.’ Well folks, Blizzard has stepped into the fray of the debate and confirmed, yes, the authenticator is secure!

Here’s the rest: For The Last Time, YES, It IS Secure

Check out Quassia. They have an interesting system to get links back to your site and I’ll be fussing around with them later this week. It’s all free as of this writing.

Basically you write or submit intell (articles) on the subject of your choice and get links back to your site. Since the links aren’t buried in some directory someplace they might actually get clicked.

Links in the articles are nofollow, links outside the articles aren’t. Right now the site looks to be mostly marketing related, since those are the most popular tags, but that’s ok, and they really do have a lot of other articles. You just have to dig through the tags a bit.

All the navigation is done by tags. So if you want to find the stuff on WoW then you go to the alphabetical list, click “W,” and you’ll get the “W” tags. There are several that are WoW related.

So check ‘em out, see if it looks good to you, maybe write some intell,  and maybe we can get some traffic from it.

Here’s my, somewhat barren, profile page. You can browse the site from there, just like Facebook and the others.