Addons: LDB, ChocolateBar

Addons: Lib Data Broker intro, Chocolate Bar

As I understand the story, it went like this: first there was Titanpanel, and it was written in a certain coding language, and many people used it, so many addon authors made addons that worked with Titan. Then there was Fubar, and it had a different coding language that was apparently less memory-intensive. Some people left Titan and went to Fubar, and some people picked up Fubar who hadn't used Titan. And some addon authors wrote addons that plugged into Fubar. Then Titan broke, and there was much QQing, and many more people went to Fubar, and the number of Fubar addons exploded. And for a while, Fubar was a golden child. Then, for a reason I'm unclear on, Fubar died a sudden, heavily-lamented death... for a new coding language had come to town, and that coding language's name was Lib Data Broker.

Titanpanel was resurrected in its new and improved form, built on LDB. Fubar, despite its beloved status, continued to wither away, as the Fubar author decided he was not going to attempt to make Fubar work with LDB. Many Fubar plugins were allowed to languish, although some continued to be updated.

LDB is not an addon itself. LDB is a language that addon authors can use to make addons. The power of LDB is that an addon author is not required to devote an entire section of code to displaying their addon; they can rely on the fact that you, the user, is going to have a display addon, such as TitanPanel, Fortress (Curse/Wowi), or Chocolate Bar (Curse/Wowinterface).

Personally, I like Chocolate Bar the best. Why? I can make it look like Fubar used to look; small black bars on the top and bottom of my screen that hold my other addons.

Rather than perform any actual functions themselves, these bars 'hold' and display other addons that do the stuff you want them to do. Maybe you would find Chocolate Bar useful simply so you can get all those buttons that crowd your minimap /off/ your minimap; as you can see, all my Altoholic, DBM, AtlasLoot, AutoBar, EBB, Omen, ORA2, etc, all these icons are no longer cluttering up my screen, but are displayed properly for easy viewing and easier access.

(And for those of you who have Fubar addons you can't live without -- I totally do, and I'll post more on them later -- there's Fubar2Broker (Curse/Wowi), which will allow your Fubar addons to work through whichever LDB display you choose. LDB is a solid coding language, but its new, and there isn't yet the spread of addons to choose from like there was for Fubar.)

Even the LDB displays I mentioned above aren't the only ones out there. Try a few, see if you like one more than the other. It's a great way to keep the information and addons you need at your fingertips without sacrificing screen space.

Addons: Altoholic, ARL

Addons: Altoholic, ARL
Current Wowcraft build: 3.3.2

I'm a bit of an addon junkie. On a scale of zero to a hundred, where a hundred is "more addons than 99% of the population could possibly expect to have running on their machine without totally bogging down into a solid brick," I'd put myself somewhere around the 50-60 mark. There are people out there with more addons than myself, I'm sure; but so many of them are just so darn handy. I'm constantly trying to prune down my addon list... and failing X D because I use nearly all of them all the time.

Some of my addons are somewhat specific to my personal tastes, so I'll leave those for later. But most of my addons are just so freakin' awesome that I cannot fathom in the slightest why you wouldn't want to run them yourself.

Of the two I will talk about today, ARL is shorter to explain. Ackis Recipe List (Curse | Wowinterface) was written by Ackis. I guess technically that should make it "Ackis' Recipe List" but you know. ARL will put a small red SCAN button in the upper right hand corner of any profession box, primary or secondary, and when you click it, it reads your box and opens a new window with a list of the recipes you do not know, and where to get them.

World drop? Trainer in Dalaran? That annoying roaming vendor in Desolace? Only sold by a vendor that isn't your faction? It will give you names, zones, and usually locs, so that you can go hunt down those last two cooking recipes. Or JC patterns. Or whatever. This has been more than invaluable while leveling scribing, as it has a list of which ones are the minor glyphs that I have to discover with research. It also color-codes the unknown recipes in relation to your current skill. If a guildie or a friend links you one of their profession boxes, you can even scan theirs for them.

What's not to love?



Altoholic (Curse | Wowinterface) is written by Thaoky. I have often said that if I were, for some reason, restricted to playing Wowcraft with only one addon, this would be the addon I would run. I'm not sure I can quickly explain to you why this addon is so awesome... primarily because it does so many things! Each of which is a supremely awesome thing.


Control-leftclick the image or this text to open the larger image in a new tab.

It keeps a searchable record of what you have on what alt. If someone links "linen cloth" and you mouseover the link, it will tell you which characters have linen cloth, how much they have, and if it's in their bags, bank, mail, or on the AH.

If you don't deselect the option, you can see how much of it is in the guild bank. Have your own bank-alt guild? Yeah, that's in the tooltip too. You can also manually look through a visual display of your alts' bags and banks. And gear. And professions. And achievements. And factions. And list of mounts/pets. And other stuff I'm sure I've missed.

If you mouse over a link to a pet, a mount, or a recipe (cooking, jc, alchemy, tailoring, LW, anything), it will tell you if the character you are currently on already knows it, and if another character can learn it, it will tell you which character and provide the current skill for comparison.




So let's say a few people in your guild run Altoholic, and you want to know which JCer can cut Puissant Dreadstone. You could ask repeatedly in guildchat during peak playing times in hopes of catching a JCer who can cut it.... oooooor, you can look yourself. In the Summary tab, click "Guild Skills," and you can sneak ninja-peeks at the profession boxes of your guildmates. Any character on their account that is in your same guild will have their profession box stored in Altoholic in this manner. (If a guildie has another character that's in another guild, Altoholic will not store profession information on that other character. However, if the guildie is online, you can ask them to link their alt's profession box -- which they can do with Altoholic, even without being on that character!)

How to link a profession box of one of your alts:
-- Characters tab
-- Choose the character from the drop down menu on the left
-- The bottom row of icons on the left are for skills; professions are usually the last two on the right. Click the one you want to link.
-- On the top part of Altoholic, there will be what looks like a little yellow chain [image forthcoming, it's Tuesday morning as I write this].
-- Open the chat box where you want to post the link; /g, /p, /2, a whisper, etc.
-- Shift-click that chain just like it were an item. Volia, a link to your alt's profession!

Notice that your friend's alt's cooking skill is low? Peek in their cooking box and mail them that jaggal clam meat you have sitting around. (Seriously, are our banks refrigerated or something?) Peek in their JC box and say, "oh, that ring that's orange to you, I want one for my alt, I'll mail you mats."

Inspecting that guy with the cool-looking shoulders and want to know where they drop? Altoholic adds a line of text that tells you what boss from what instance dropped that phat lewt. Worried you have mail on an alt that's about to expire? Altoholic gives you a notice when you log in if any of your alts have mail under 5 days (there's an option to edit the day limit... or at least there used to be, now I can't find it o_0). Can't ever remember when your Moonshroud CD is up? (Or Glacial Bag CD after 3.3.3.) Or if your Oracles Egg is going to hatch tomorrow or the next day? Pretty much everything with a cooldown timer -- alchemy transmutes, cloth creation, scribing research, etc -- you can look on the Calendar and see when that's up... without having to log to that character.

If you have more than one character in Wowcraft, you need to at least try this addon. It is amazing, and it will save your sanity more than I can describe in mere words.

Here are some more links to screenshots of Altoholic in action. These are the same links found at the bottom of the Curse page. I'm linking them in here in case you need more impetus to go get this awesome addon!
-- Skills summary + leveling suggestions.
-- Search bags & known recipes (linkable).
-- List of crafts + materials.
-- Achievements UI.

How to: RSS

What is this RSS stuff and why/how should I use it?


This RSS stuff is awesome, that's why. And the how is much simpler than you might expect (or fear). Let me dissertate on the why for a moment more.

If there is ANY content on the internet that updates on anything resembling a periodic basis that you follow, be it a webcomic, a news site, or a Wowcraft blog, chances are it has an RSS feed. (Unless it's Dominic Deegan. I think Mookie avoids RSS just to annoy people : p.) Any individual post on a site will be an individual post in that feed.

You, the reader, can use an 'aggregator' to collect all these feeds from various sites and organize them for your consumption. It's like designing your own personalized internet newspaper. Some aggregators allow you to share posts from the feeds you read with other users of that aggregator, so if your friends find something funny or interesting, they can share it with you. Also, the aggregator will remember what you have and have not read, so if you go on vacation for a week and come back, you don't have to paw through a ton of sites trying to figure out what you've missed; the aggregator says "here's what's been posted since you were last here!" How handy.

Are you sold yet? If not, give this a whirl anyway. You just might find yourself hooked.

There are many aggregators available. Since I have my Gmails open all the time, I'm most familiar with Google Reader. If you're not a Gmail user, poke your email provider of choice and see if they have an aggregator available (I'm fairly certain Yahoo has something that will do the job); if not, consider searching for a plugin for your browser (Firefox has many such plugins). All my screenshots, however, are based out of my Gmail and Google Reader tabs.

In the upper lefthand corner of Gmail, there is a link to Reader.


Open this in a new tab, and you will see (a slightly larger version of) this.


No subscriptions in there just yet! Next, go to your favorite webcomic or Wowcraft blog, and look around for one of two things. Usually, what you should keep your eyes peeled for is the orange RSS icon, like this:

Most websites will have their RSS feed link somewhere within the top screen's worth of their site, and it shouldn't be hard to find. However, Blogger.com blogs (of which this is one) and Blogspot.com blogs are slightly different; you will want to scroll to the absolute very bottom of the main page (make sure you're not looking at a single post within a Blogger blog) and look for
"Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)".
(If you're looking at a single post, you will see "Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)". You very specifically do NOT want this! You will be subscribing to a feed of comment-replies to that post only, and while that could be educational, it's not really what you want.)

In either case, right click the RSS icon or the Posts Atom link, and choose "copy link location" or the equivalent command.

Then go back to your Reader or aggregator of choice.

Click the blue "Add Subscription" button and paste in your copied feed address.

Reader will query the server and import the last little chunk of posts for you to read and enjoy. Repeat for each site you read, and say goodbye to clunky, chunky bookmark lists and the hassle of trying to remember when your favorite webcomic or blog posts their updates.

You can also sort feeds into folders. In Google Reader, in the very lower left corner, click 'Manage Subscriptions', then click Add to a Folder, type in the folder name you want, and voila:


Any further Wowcraft blogs you add, you can simply drag them into that folder without going through Settings. If you have non-Wowcraft blogs, click 'Manage subscriptions' again and make a new folder for one, then go back to the main page and drag the others into the desired folder.

A nice thing that Reader does (others may or may not do this) is, if you had 5 blogs in your 'Wowcraft Blogs' folder and they each had 1 new post, you could simply click the folder itself to read all the new posts in that whole folder. Or, if a single blog has many new posts since the last time you read it, maybe you want to read each blog one at a time by clicking its name.

You can add dozens, even hundreds (if you're /really/ nuts and have nothing better to do than read RSS feeds alllll day) of feeds. Mmo-champion.com has an amazingly-difficult-to-find-a-link-for feed (general Wowcraft news, ie patch notes and commentary), and I also read TankingTips.com (a warrior-centered-but-not-entirely-exclusive blog that talks about tanking in Wowcraft). Some feeds put the entirety of their post right into the RSS post; some feeds only provide a teaser amount of information and you must control-leftclick the link to open the post's individual page in a new tab in order to read the content.

Livejournal communities also have built-in RSS feeds, with the following format:
http://community.livejournal.com/communityname/data/rss
Replace 'communityname' with the name of your comm, copy that into your Add Subscription, and away you go. Warning: while it's not technically true that "only open posts are viewable in this fashion", this post in LJ FAQs kind of went over my head.

Even a casually-used aggregator can save you lots of time and lots of brainspace. No longer do you need to try to recall how long it's been since you checked a certain blog for an update. No longer do you need to comb through three weeks of webcomic backlog, searching for the last strip you read, and spoiling yourself in the process. No longer do you need to sit on someone's site, hitting refresh until you see their new post. The aggregator does the footwork for you. Just input the feeds, organize them into folders as desired, and let it do its thing.

Happy Reading!

First!

It is my firm belief that all individuals who consider themselves 'creative' in any productive fashion also recognize, even if they do not verbally admit, that they are, in at least some very small sense, insane.

I do not consider myself an exception.

This is not my primary blog. That is, at the core, why I consider myself a little nuts for starting it. Historically, I do not 'do well' with more than one 'thing' that serves whatever purpose that 'thing' serves. Let's start with email; until I forced myself to install a second (third if you count MSIE which I don't) browser on my computer, I was horrible at checking my real-name Gmail account... but my Sanna-name Gmail account was always open. I live at my primary journal, but I half-suspect that this blog will not get updated as much as it... deserves? I could also mention the Facebook I never log into... but if I never log in, should I even mention?

Then again, that's what I said about the other one. Three thousand posts later >_> I think I can admit defeat there.

This blog will be where I talk about World of Warcraft. I don't know how many specifying details will be included, as what I plan on talking about won't require specific servername.charname combinations (altho we'll see what ends up happening). Right now I plan on having posts where I talk about my favorite addons and why you should use them, a handful of posts on "I'm 80, now what?", and my very next post is intended to be "What is this RSS stuff and why/how should I use it?".

My main character is a warrior tank (at which I am fairly awesome) who has an arms offspec (at which I am no longer totally fail), on whom I raid. My main alt is a healy priest (at which I feel I am tolerably decent... people don't die too often) who has a shadow offspec (at which I feel I am only not-fail because she has T9 healy gear that lets her do 2k dps), on whom I do not currently raid. I have a nearly-50 shammy (currently enh/healy but I want to switch the enh to ele eventually) who is only being leveled because I'm beginning to want a pocket JC. My professions are Alchemy/Herbing, Tailoring/Mining, and Scribing/Herbing that might be ditched for JC/Mining. I also have a tiny pally, a nameholding warlock, and a fairly-abandoned mage on that same server, and on another server I have a leetle drood, any of which I might level... someday, maybe, probably not. If none of the above things (plus the planned addon posts) interest you or pertain to your playing experience, this blog will probably fall outside your area of giving a crap.

To the rest of you: Welcome! I'll try to not be completely boring ^_^.

-- Sanna
(It is /so/ weird going by that name in relation to Wowcraft stuff... I'm so accustomed to people calling me by my characters' names, haha~)