The Innocent Abroad

Playing World of Warcraft can be quite rewarding. It may be just pixels on the screen but those pixels make me happy. Blizzard implemented a feature called Achievements last year and it is very satisfactory to get those. Especially when the work sucks and nothing changes for the better there, getting an achievement in the game perks me up.

There are many different areas of achievements: questing, dungeons and raids, PvP, professions, world events, and so on. Some of these require other players' participation, some can be soloed. I've mostly concentrated on the solo achievements and asked help of my guildies when I needed it.

Yesterday I got nine achievements*, one of which I've been working on for a year: What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been. It is a meta-achievement (a compilation of achievements) that requires the player to complete all achievements for seasonal world events. Those events take place during holidays such as Christmas, Midsummer, Halloween, Easter, and so on. They can only be completed during that holiday in the game.

The reward for completing this achievement is a violet proto-drake, an extremely fast flying mount. Just by happenstance Reea's hair is magenta and this "violet" proto-drake is exactly the same shade! It made the long, sometimes frustrating, work to get the drake all the more worthwhile. Besides, it's faster than the fast mount I had and has awesome animation.

The first time I looked at the achievements, I was certain I would never be able to get it. This achievement requires questing, PvP, raiding, help from others, and crazy amounts of dedication for a whole year; I would not have gotten this far if it hadn't been for the help I got from my guildies and BF. Thank you!

* Those nine are: Sweet Tooth, My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose, Fool For Love, What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, Champion of the Undercity, Exalted Champion of the Undercity, Champion of the Horde, Exalted Champion of the Horde, and Exalted Argent Champion of the Horde.

Of course, by trying to make things work, I managed to break everything that could be broken. I'd messed with the DNS settings without really knowing how they work and the results were ugly: the main blog disappeared, I couldn't access anything whatsoever via my tools and it was a weekend.

So I messed with things some more via the hosting service's control panel. First, I put DNS settings back as they were before, moved the blog to the new address and added a redirect from the old blog page to the new. Then I let the DNS changes propagate and waited to see what I'd broken this time.

I'd tested the move before and it worked with the old BlogSpot blog. There was a risk that it would break because I'd moved things around, but I know now how to make it work again so I went ahead anyway. Besides, the main blog was inaccessible on the old address, so it didn't make any difference.

As I expected I got the main site visible again, but broke the connection between Blogger and the blog site. The redirect from the old blog to the new worked beautifully, except because the CNAME record had been replaced by A NAME record, there was nothing to see there and I could not fix it immediately, so I slapped up a quick notice and settled down for yet another 24 hour period to wait for the changes to propagate.

If I had known that an address can not have an A NAME and a CNAME record at the same time, I would have deleted the A NAME records when I set things back to defaults and saved myself some time. As it was I should have deleted anything even remotely to do with citikas.2cinquefoils.net, but I usually try not to delete too much.

The Blogger help page with instructions how to configure publishing to a custom domain was remarkably unhelpful at explaining the why's and whatfore's of what they wanted me to do. If they had been clearer, the move would have been as simple and easy as they claim it to be.

Even after waiting some more, the hosting control panel still wouldn't let me add a CNAME record. Gah! I did it once, and took it away, why, oh why, wouldn't it work again?! Then I slept on it, took another look at the control panel and fixed everything.

One thing that could not be fixed is the feed address, but that was to be expected and was explained by Blogger beforehand. If you are using Bloglines or any other reader, please use this new address: http://citikas.2cinquefoils.net/ to subscribe to the feed.

And, hopefully, this is the end.

Yesterday I got an e-mail from Blogger saying that they 'will no longer support FTP publishing in Blogger after March 26, 2010'. Sigh. FTP is what I use to publish this blog.

When I first made the blog, BlogSpot didn't exist and I used FTP, then I tried BlogSpot and it worked fine, but when I bought my own domain, I wanted my blog to reside there so I went back to FTP and have continued to use it.

In the meantime, Blogger has implemented new ways of hosting and linking blogs which, I must admit, are better than just plain FTP. Since things were working as they should, I haven't poked around or changed anything, but now I shall have to.

This blog has been hosted in at least four places and each time I have moved I've lost readers because of it. I do not want this to happen again! I will do my best to keep the blog as stable as I can over the transition. Hopefully, the only things that change are the technical ones in the background, not how they look.

This time, I didn't exactly rearrange everything. I just made the 'bedroom' corner presentable. If you are interested where the various things came from, click on the photo and take a look at the notes.

The whole corner after tidying up.

Window after putting up a blind and arranging the curtains differently.

I'm not done with this space. I want to add pillows and some plants or lamps on the window sill. Pillows will probably be black, but I want a bamboo or another grass in the window to tie that corner in with the 'living room' space.

HaloScan is my second provider for comment software on this blog and I've been happy with them up to now. Today I received a notice that HaloScan will shut down on 13th of February.

This is the second time my comments provider went under. The first provider just disappeared and I lost a couple years' worth of comments. Luckily, this time there is a two weeks notice and a possibility to save the comments in xml form.

I was very sad to lose the comments back then because I appreciate each and every one of them. Maybe there will be a way for me to import the comments I saved this time, but at least I have them.

I had been so happy with HaloScan that I chose not to use Blogger comments when they were implemented. Now, I'm enabling them and I hope they are as painless to use as HaloScan was.

Update: Sigh. And within two days I get my first comment spam. That's why I loved HaloScan so much, I got no spam whatsoever. I am sorry, but I had to turn on the comment moderation to keep spam away.