(You can read all of Kaet’s adventures, starting with why I’m doing things this way, by checking out the series Table of Contents at the end of this post. Alternatively, if you are here primarily for juicy pet-related news, feel free to skip these bits — they’re optional.)

Last I left off I had just reached level 6 and trained my level 2-6 skills after finishing up all the quests in the Northshire area. Next up, of course, was Goldshire.

Continue reading →

I spent most of the day fixing minimum width issues under IE6 (*sigh*) but I did find time to get some new/old info back up. It’s really late and I’m incredibly tired so I’ll just list a couple of useful things.

• There are shortcuts to simple level and zone searches on the front page now, so it’s easier to find those functions. They feed right into the main database so you can start with a level or zone search and then refine by diet or skill or what have you from there. It wasn’t always obvious before that the database had replaced the old Pets by Level and Pets by Zone pages, but hopefully this will help.
• The “Show me the pets!” shortcut on the front page now opens up options for seeing all the pet appearances or just a specific type of pets (damage, armor, etc.).
• I completely revamped the old family stat page (which was just the table of all the stat modifiers) into a more broad family comparison page. It has color-coded tables for comparing diet, skills, and stat modifiers across families. There’s a good bit more to be said about most of these things, and more work to make that information accessible, but these charts will do for now. Tomorrow I hope to get them hooked up to the family, mob, and skin pages.

I got through all of the feedback e-mail from yesterday this morning but I haven’t really looked at it since, so I’ll get through all of today’s feedback tomorrow morning. If I haven’t answered you yet, please be patient – I have a lot to dig through, and I’m making tweaks  to the site as I go. :>

First, Big Red Kitty has a great article on WoWInsdier this week, What Kind of Hunter Are You?, in which he talks about all the newb mistakes that lay in wait to trap an unsuspecting young (or not so young) hunter. Now I admit, reading BRK sometimes (often!) leaves me feeling bad about my own abilities as a hunter, but this column made me feel better. :>

(As an aside, I think one of the bigger mistakes Blizzard made with the hunter class conceptually was to leave so much very important information outside the game. Sure, the advanced details and mathematical analysis of pets and skills belongs on external websites, but it would be nice if basic info about how important pets are and how to go about training a pet was being transmitted in-game where it belongs. *shrug* Personal rant.)

Continue reading →

I’ve just uploaded a whole bunch of changes to the Petopia website. Most of these are fairly subtle changes meant to make things easier for me, but some of them are also meant to make things easier for you. :>

Now I should start by saying that, just like a live MMO game, a web site like Petopia is a living, growing thing. And it’s going to go on growing — there’s a lot of work left to do, a lot of small tweaks I want to make, major features I want to add, interesting research I want to host, all sorts of things –  but since there’s just me whacking away at it right now, it won’t all get done overnight. So expect ongoing changes as I continue to polish things up. :>

The flip side of that is that I have a lot of opportunity to evaluate feedback as I go. It doesn’t matter if I am excited about a change if it makes it harder to use the site. So I’m going to be watching all the feedback I get about changes to Petopia very carefully. If you have a comment or a suggestion, please drop me an e-mail! I prefer e-mail for this kind of feedback — I find it easier to sort and track that way.

Continue reading →

So Comic-Con was a bust. I somehow thought that since we’d bought tickets ahead of time, we’d be able to, you know, get in. But there was a two hour line when we got there, and after we wandered around downtime for a bit and had some lunch, it had gotten longer. *sigh*

We weren’t going to wait that long in the sun. My husband’s bald head just got over being badly sunburned and I have a bad tendency of passing out when I overheat.

So we came home instead. But I used the rest of my day wisely – getting a big update for Petopia ready to go live. So that was something. :>