slaggle dot com

• Just finished off a very smooth Heroic Mechanar run in WoW tonight. 100 Badges, only 50 more to go for the epic weapon coming in 2.4! #
• Using Inkscape to create a website design. I like the program, but I might eventually pony up the dough for Fireworks. #
• World of Warcraft patch 2.4 hits the live realms today! I know what I’ll be doing tonight! #
• @istarman Do you like Spaz better than Twhirl? #
• Spending the morning working with CSS, creating a testbed for our new application. I really love working with CSS and XHTML. Standards FTW! #
• @istarman I decided to try it too. So far I like the look of Spaz, but prefer the features and feel of Twhirl. I need to learn Air now! #

• Just finished a homemade steak dinner for Easter and watched Appleseed Ex Machina. The food was great, the movie was… eh… #
• I’m feeling pretty optimistic about the ideas I’ve been having. I hope I can get others as excited about it. Things can really take off! #
• Goodnight, Twitter. Time to strap on some headphones, listen to a podcast, and fall asleep. #
• @istarman I do E-mail -> Firefox -> Eclipse -> Pidgin -> irc -> then twitter. But really all at the same time. #
• Good morning Twitter! Time for loads of coffee and wading through the Monday Madness. #
• RSS feeds: Full content or teaser to pull users to your site? Myself, i’d much rather prefer full content in an RSS feed. #
• Mmmm… English Breakfast tea from Adagio. Very tasty. #
• Friendfeed’s atom feed contains a lot of CSS in the content. I’d prefer class names so I can control the CSS myself. #
• Does Socialthing have invites? I’d love to try that out and compare it to FriendFeed for my convergence needs. #
• @JasonCalacanis if Mahalo is spam then pass me another slice. #
• I’m dead. My trainer put me on a new workout circuit and it is mega tough. It’ll pay off though. #
• @hornbeck Do tell! I want to hear your awesome news! #
• "Live humans answer the phone!" Do some companies have zombies for CSRs? "Hi, I forgot my password." "Uggh.. new one is BRAIINSS" #
• Thank the FSM for apps like soapUI. It makes my job soooo much easier. http://www.soapui.org/ #
• Ah! Reading the latest from @wilw reminded me to look for a good used drum stool online. Would a fog machine be too much for Rock Band? #
• Considering using jQuery and YUI components for my latest JEE project. #

I’ve been thinking more about converging the data from various social mediums (as I blogged about previously) and lo and behold, Twitter comes to the rescue!

Robert Scoble mentioned a service called FriendFeed that takes the RSS feeds available from a large variety of web 2.0 social applications and combines it into a single feed of data. You can also keep track of your friends in the same data stream.

The idea is almost exactly what I had in mind. I want to provide people a single place they can come and see what I’ve been up to on the web (in a Truman Show way, if you think about it). FriendFeed provides this, but I only wish it were more customizable.

For instance, instead of linking to a blog post, it would be nice if I could include the entire text of the blog. It would also be nice if the feed they provide contained more semantic data (such as the source of the entry or even preview icons/images) so I could more easily change the presentation based on where the data is coming from.

Another drawback is that the FriendFeed atom feed contains inline CSS in the code, which really makes it hard for me to syndicate into my own site. So really this application is close, but not quite what I want.

There’s another application that is supposed to provide closer interaction with social application API’s and provide a similar tool to FriendFeed. This application is called Socialthing!, and looks pretty promising. It is in closed beta right now, so unless someone is nice and can throw me an invite (hint, hint) I can’t evaluate it for my convergence needs just yet.

If neither of these work, I may have to consider my own solution. I need something simple that provides more semantic data than what is currently available, for the sole purposes of syndicating it and making it a part of my own site. Does any of this make sense?

Comment on this if you have any ideas, or shoot a tweet to @bratta.

• Did some daily quests to get enough gold to run The Eye tonight. We WILL get Void Reaver down tonight. #
• Setting up FriendFeed. I think this is pretty darn close to the social convergence ideas I’ve been pondering. #
• Raiding Recap: We couldn’t get the tanks required for TK, so we thrashed Gruul’s Lair instead. I didn’t win any rolls for loot though. #

• Time flies when you are coding PHP. I should take a break and get some dinner. #
• Going to eat lunch at an Irish pub. Hooray Irish food! Hooray beer! #
• Bought a mic stand for Rock Band #

• I listened to MC Frontalot loudly on the drive to work this morning, so I’m going to have to be careful speaking to my customers today. #
• @feliciaday Congrats on the YouTube Award win! #
• Parts of my job really suck. I’m too nice of a guy to be a team lead sometimes. #
• Google’s AJAX Language API is pretty sweet: http://snurl.com/22bas #
• ytcracker + awesome subwoofer + php coding in eclipse = EPIC WIN! #
• If you can’t tell, I’m listening to a lot of nerdcore today. Next up: MC Hawking #
• @drinkinstein Thanks! I’ll be sure to download your music and give it a listen! #
• @scobleizer It was surreal watching you through @kevinrose ’s quik videos too. You guys have too much fun! #

• Nooeeesss! My cable is out and I was supposed to run Karazhan!! #
• Need sequence diagrams in a hurry but can’t be bothered with StarUML or Visio? Try this: http://www.websequencediagrams.com/ #
• Cable is back on, yay! I managed to watch a disc of Death Note tonight but didn’t get to raid or work on any web site stuff. #
• @goldteam is the winning team! Go @goldteam go! #
• How to build a twitter bot with Groovy and Grails in like 10 minutes: http://memo.feedlr.com/?p=11 #
• Looking at VPS webhosts. I bet I can find a new host with better offerings for a cheaper price than my current host. #
• I’m off to eat some Thai food and plan the return of an old podcast (ohh.. did I say too much?) #

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a big fan of being connected on the web. I’m really into the social aspect of the way the web is evolving and I am usually among the first to try new things online. I’m also very fond of having an idea and immediately trying to do something with it.

That last part gets me into trouble sometimes. I will have an idea for a web site, start putting it together, and then realize that it is just not what I want to do. I have about half a dozen “idea sites” out there that don’t get any real traffic and don’t really do anything important. I’m too impulsive, I guess.

So over the past few weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I think it is time to buckle down and get serious about my online presence. I can’t just start something spur of the moment without putting a lot of thought into it, and whatever I do it has to be something I can pour my heart and soul into. It can’t be something that I only have a marginal interest in maintaining.

That being said, I’m going to go through my domain list on my web server and start shutting some things down so I can focus. This in and of itself isn’t an impulsive act, but something I’ve really been considering for a long time. It is time for me to choose what I am going to be serious about.

As of now, I plan on keeping slaggle.com up and running, because it has become my de facto weblog for many years. It started out as a test site for new ideas for Cold Hard Slag as a new search idea for toy price guide info (now you can see where the name came from!) but eventually it just became a blog.

I’ve already decided what it is I’m going to focus on, but I don’t want to be very hasty in announcing it. I need to solidify some ideas first, to see if it is viable. Feel out the waters, so to speak. Once that is done, I’ll just have two web sites. This one and the other.

I will give you a hint about what I plan to focus my energies on: It will be something huge. Very big. And it is a dramatic evolution of something I’ve already done before. Don’t worry, I plan on moving forward with this so you will know very soon what it is I have planned.

• The estimate on repairs to the car was around $500. A lot better than I thought it would be! #
• Running Tempest Keep: The Eye right now. About to pull Al’ar. #
• We didn’t get Al’ar down, but we learned a lot about the fight. My warlock topped the damage meters by far. Yay! #
• In other news, I’m almost finished with my redesign of slaggle.com. Then I’ll focus on content convergence issues. #
• Off to bed. Otherwise I’m going to be up refreshing Twitter all night. #
• What would life be like if caffeine were a controlled substance instead of being considered a safe food substance? #
• @istarman I’ve been there! I spent hours cursing AdSense wondering why it didn’t work. AdBlock Plus was messing me up. So am I a hypocrite? #
• Yay! The Insurance adjuster is sending a check for our car repairs. Quickest turnaround ever! #
• Looking forward to either watching Death Note or the new Appleseed movie tonight. #
• I may have to do more research. Zude didn’t grab me like it did @scobleizer. #

My World of Warcraft guild is progressing onward from raiding Karazhan and Gruul’s Lair. We’re moving on to tackle The Eye in Tempest Keep, a 25-man raid that is the starting point for Tier-5 raiding. It marks an exciting step for our raiding group because we are maturing quite a bit and starting to work together well.

To learn the first couple of bosses and to become more cohesive as a group, we’re raiding The Eye on two nights. Tuesdays and Saturdays. Tuesday nights we are working on learning to fight the first boss, Al’ar, and on Saturday we will work on the second boss Void Reaver.

The reason we are doing it like this is that there aren’t as many trash mob pulls to Al’ar so it fits well with our limited play time during the week. Yes, most of us have real life obligations to consider. But the weekend isn’t as limited on time, so we can spend more time on the arguably harder trash mobs to the second boss.

I know a lot of people focus more on Void Reaver first. You can actually get to him and skip the first boss, and Void Reaver is easy to the point that people call him “Loot Reaver”. But really the mobs you have to fight before him require a LOT of coordination we’re finding.

Anyway, last night we made our first attempt at Al’ar. People telling us that “oh you don’t have the DPS for this” and “he’s so hard, let’s just skip him”. I am happy to say that while we didn’t get him down, it wasn’t because of a lack of DPS or healing. We wiped because we’ve never faced him before and don’t know the fight very well. Our tanks were struggling to keep coordinated so we kept getting Flame Buffets hitting the raid, and some tanks couldn’t get away from the Flame Quills . Nothing that practice won’t solve even if we don’t change up our gear too much. It was pretty exciting.

I had the privilege of being the Warlock to stay on top of the threat meters. I removed the Blessing of Salvation buff, changed up some gear to output more raw DPS, and threw everything I had at Al’ar constantly. The reason behind this is that in Phase 1 you can’t pull aggro from the tanks but in Phase 2 the main tank needs to build up a lot of threat. So the idea is for me to get as much threat as I can, and as Phase 2 starts and Al’ar makes a beeline for me, the main tank Taunts him and I Soulshatter, dumping all my threat. It basically slingshots a ton of threat to the main tank. Quite a neat idea!

Doing that gave me the honor of easily topping the damage meters for that fight. I was quite pleased by that and look forward to continuing our progress in this raid.