Mania’s Arcania

I’m not done with the Cataclysm Safari by any means, but I’ve delayed the next … section? episode? chapter? … for a moment while I concentrate on getting basic Cataclysm information up on Petopia.

As galling as it sometimes is, many more people read Petopia than this little blog – by many orders of magnitude! – and so sharing information there is, well, more effective. At least when we’re talking about pretty tables, like what pets live in the new Cataclysm zones or what new looks may be available.

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You may have noticed that I have a small problem with web sites: I seem to be addicted to creating them.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve spent some spare minutes here and there working on a little project called WoW Tabards. As you might expect, WoW Tabards is a visual database of the tabards that you can collect in World of Warcraft. For example, you can see all the tabards from the WoW Trading Card Game or all the Argent Tournament tabards.

You can also create an account and use the site to track your tabard collections on one or more characters. I find this especially useful since there’s no in-game tabard panel (yet) and I’d otherwise have to go digging through my bank every time I wanted to see what I already have. (I have 26 tabards at the moment.)

Now I know there are already sites that let you track your tabard collection — I’m thinking primarily of WoW Collect — but since I prefer Warcraft Pets for my mini-pets and Warcraft Mounts (of course!) for my mounts, I really only needed tabards.

And anyway, once I get an image in my head of what I want, I can’t shake it. And I am moderately proud of the look and feel of WoW Tabards — I think the very simple color layout and color scheme really brings out the colors of the tabards themselves.

(Now if I could just make Warcraft Mounts pretty … )

It’s been quiet around here lately for a whole bunch of reasons.

One of the reasons is that I’ve been sick a lot: repeated colds, sinus infections, and my first ever asthma attack. (Woo hoo? I’ve had allergies for awhile, especially to our two adorable pet rats, but I’ve mostly ignored it — which according to my doctor is why my symptoms have advanced from sniffles to raised welts to an inability to breathe. So let that be a lesson for you! Take your allergy meds before you get to the point where you can’t breathe!) I’ve also been struggling with my mental health. (My husband says I shouldn’t tell you that, and perhaps he’s right. But I like to explain why I sometimes disappear for weeks on end, and that’s a big part of it.) And lastly, I’ve been trying to drum up new contracts so my husband and I don’t go broke in a month or two. Anyway, I’m not looking for sympathy or making excuses; I just want to let you know where we are.

As you may have noticed, I’ve moved most of the ‘newsy’ stuff off of this blog and over to the new WoW Petopia Community forums. This way, when I am unavoidably detained, community members who are more on the ball than I am can post any news that happens, and my loyal staff of moderator (hi, Vephriel!) can make sure it shows up in the news feed. I’ve added a display of the most recent news items from the community to the top of the front page here, or you can subscribe to the news feed and cut out the … err … middle-blog.

So what’s going to go here, on Arcania? Well hopefully I’ll get back to some more sort-of-in-depth-but-not-necessarily-literature-for-the-ages type posts, like (and these are just examples): “How Many Spirit Beasts Do We Have Now Anyway?”, “Best-Looking Pets for a Goblin”, and “15 Unusual Pet Choices”. I’d also still like to highlight interesting stuff from other hunter blogs … if I ever get caught up with the 1000+ unread posts I have on Google Reader. (Amusingly, I first typed that as ‘undead posts’, which is also appropriate.) And if I ever get back to actually playing WoW, I’d like to talk about that as well.

(I have been futzing around in WoW a bit, via the US branch of the forum-based Petopians guild. Of course, being the difficult person I am, I had to start a druid for this hunter-oriented guild. But on the good side, my druid appears to be stuck at level 7. I also started some new hunters there but so far haven’t progressed beyond level 10. And Mania (the main character, not the writer of this post) hasn’t been any further than the auction house in weeks. Once Blizzard gets the armory-based auction house functuionality out, I won’t need to log her in at all! *sigh*)

And of course Cataclysm is coming up — sooner or later! — and what is Arcania without incoherent, stream-of-conscious live-blogging? (In fact, I’m somewhat glad that I’m not playing too much right now. I just hope that my disinterested phase lasts until I can get into the beta so I don’t wear myself out too early.)

So that’s Mania’s State of the Blog address and Five Year Plan all rolled up in one.

[update] We’re back up! And earlier than I expected — turns out Jon’s really good. :>

I’ve just learned from our hosting system administrator (also known as our friend Jon) that he needs to do some emergency maintenance on our server boxes later today.

Basically this means that all my sites — Mania’s Arcania, the new WoW Petopia Community forums, Petopia, and Warcraft Mounts — will be down for a couple of hours this evening.

Unfortunately, because of the type of maintenance he needs to do, I won’t be able to have any sort of useful message up while this is happening, so anyone who wanders in during the maintenance will only see that the sites are down. So if you see someone freaking out, please let then know that we’ll be back up in an hour or two.

The sites will be going down around 5pm EST and should be back up by 8pm EST. Thanks for bearing with us through this!

You can now find a fairly full-featured forum for the discussion of WoW hunter pets on Petopia! Just visit forums.wow-petopia.com.

My plans: I originally started the Arcania forums attached to this blog so that you guys would have somewhere to chat when I wasn’t posting. That worked out pretty well, except that I choose my forum software poorly^* and the location was a bit off the beaten path — hard to find for the average Petopia user who just wanted to know what was going on with pets. The new Petopia forums should fix both problems.

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With BlizzCon only two weeks away, rumors about what we’ll learn there are beginning to swirl frantically around the WoW-o-sphere. (Some of these are apparently fueled by carefully-tended teasers and ‘leaks’. Others are probably just made-up.)

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[edit] As of Wednesday evening, Petopia is back up. The site is currently rather slow because we’re still working out some tweaks with our server, but hopefully we’ll have that smoothed out soon.

[edit #2] And most of the slowness should now be eliminated thanks to our wonderful server admin Jon. (Thanks, Jon!)

If you see any problems, here or with Petopia, please let me know. Thank you again, everyone, for your patience!

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Turns out I need to move this blog to a new server today. Who knew! (Apparently I was supposed to know but I forgot.) *grin*

Anyway, all the work should be taking place on the back end and completely invisible to readers, but it is possible that if you comment at exactly the wrong time, your comment may be eaten. So be aware of that.

[Update] Theoretically we are now transitioned to the new server. Please let me know if you see any irregularities. Thanks for your patience!

[UPDATE]

The normal home of Petopia is back up and operation. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your great patience as we worked through this problem.

*grin*

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The 2009 Petopia Calendar is now available from Mania’s Arcania Emporia, my awkwardly-named CafePress shop!

This year’s calendar features twelve gorgeous, original works of art based on twelve of my favorite pets, both old and new. Some of my favorites include a jormungar (January, shown here), Blacksting (September), a fiery orange dragonhawk (May), and of course Loque’nahak (June). You can see the entire calendar with all the artwork by hitting the link above or to the left, then choosing “View Calendar Pages”.

I may eventually be offering posters and other items (mugs, shorts, etc.) with the individual monthly art, but with the calendar you get all twelve images at once.

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