July 07 Wrapup

Posted by Stropp on August 1, 2007

July has been something of a transitional month for me. I quit my job in June and finished up there right at the end of the month. I’ve now gone back into contracting and started a six month contract about ten days ago. I was at my old employer for over seven years and it does feel a little odd adjusting to a new place and new people. But the work is interesting and the money is good.

Gaming and blogging burnout has been a bit of an issue for me this year. The year started well with lots of enthusiasm, but from April through June it has been a real struggle just to get in and do any of it. There were a few times when I strongly considered shutting down the blog. I think a big part of this was the issues that were occuring at work at the time.

I think I started to feel a turn around during July. Even though my new job is pretty busy (I’m coming in late on a large long term project) and has a steep learning curve, I’ve been feeling more relaxed. I’ve also decided to play what I want, when I want. No more feeling obligated to play a certain amount.

New Blog Theme

July also saw the introduction of the new Stropp’s World theme. That took a lot longer than I expected. I first started by trying to build a Wordpress theme from scratch myself, but it was a lot more work than I expected. I then decided to get someone else to do it for me. Unfortunately that didn’t work out too well. After a lot of emails and waiting for results it became apparent that it wasn’t going to happen. At that point I selected the theme you see now, made a couple of mods to the banner for the title and installed it, after upgrading to the latest Wordpress version.

Poll Results

The July Poll question was: The New Look is:

All up nine people voted with the following result; 44% (4) think it is Absolutely Brilliant, 33% (3) think it Is a Reasonable Effort, 11% (1) think their Grandmother could do better, and 11% (1) couldn’t get it to work in their browser.

World of Warcraft

After several months where I haven’t touched World of Warcraft, I decided to see if I could revive my flagging interest by doing something different. I’d never really played on a PvP server before so I decided to create a Rogue on a PvP server. I also bought Joana’s 1- 70 Horde Guide. That’s also something I haven’t done before.

So far so good. Stropp the Rogue has reached level 10 and has done the Rogue quest which earned him a nice dagger. No PvP interaction yet though. I guess that will happen big time when he reaches the Barrens.

Lord of the Rings Online

Lord of the Rings Online is on the backburner at the moment. It’s one of the downsides of the Lifetime Subscription payment model that there is less imperative to play the game since there is no monthly fee to be justified. That’s an upside too. I can put it on the backburner without worry about wasting the monthly fee. I’m not done with this game yet.

Everquest 2

My chronic altaholism manifested itself with the creation of several Everquest 2 during July. Nothing spectacular. I created a few Arasi (evil fairies) and played them up to around level 11.

XBox 360

Some friends gave me a gift voucher for my birthday and I bought Forza Motorsport 2. I also went out and splurged on a Logitech Steering Wheel and Pedals to give me that authentic behind-the-wheel feeling. My easy chair is now the cockpit of a racecar! Very cool game. I’ve never really been a sports game fan, but Forza is a lot of fun. However, I’m no way near ready for the PvP tournaments yet.

Site Stats

• According to AWStats, Stropp’s World received 3508 unique visitors who visited 6003 times and viewed 18597 pages.
• The number of RSS subscribers exceeded 150 for the first time.
• Akismet blocked 15000 pieces of spam for the first time. Can you imagine a blog with 15000 spam comments? It would be unreadable.
• World of Warcraft Addiction was the top search term used to find my site. A blog post made last year still gets results in the search rankings.

Blog Experiments

You probably noticed the removal of all of the Google advertisements and the other advertising banners. The blog looks much nicer now. I did put some affiliate links to some WoW guides on the sidebar. I didn’t expect to see any earnings come out of them, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised.

I also did an experiment with Stumbleupon over a few days last month to see if I could increase my blog traffic. While traffic increased while the SU campaign was running, it dropped back to normal levels when it finished.

Goals for August

• Get back to posting more regularly. There’s a few tricks I want to try to get this happening.
• Get back into a more regular gaming schedule. This is a bit trickier. I’ve got a few things on the burners at the moment. Coupled with a busy work schedule my time is tight.
• Look into a banner or logo for the blog. I’m essentially using a slightly modified version of the Dark Alley theme banner. I’d like to get something more suitable for a MMO blog.
• Continue experimenting with Stumbleupon to increase blog traffic. Even though the small experiment I conducted in July didn’t achieve spectactular results, I have a feeling it’s still worth continuing the experiment.
• Achieve 200 RSS subscribers. This would be really cool.

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