There is no particularly good way to make this long story short, so I’ll just be my usual terse self. For a variety of reasons, I am taking my leave of the internet and of computers in general for the next two weeks. I’ll have email – so no shenanigans! – but otherwise I’m going dark. Have fun, and do all the things I wouldn’t do!

Since this also happens to be post #100, you may feel free to treat it as an open thread. What’s on your mind?

I’m trying to get threaded comments and editable comments working nicely together. It’s not going well. If anyone has any suggestions, I welcome them.

In the meantime, here’s a comment topic for you, in honor of 3.3′s new Need Before Greed system: what’s your favorite piece of “wrong” gear – gear that’s not in your “optimal” armor class but that you can still wear, and that you prefer to wear over the available gear that is “optimal”?

• how to play a priest: I would never dictate how you should play a priest. That said, I have a series of guides in the works that might be helpful.
• glyph of penance: Reduces the cooldown of Penance by 2 seconds. The recipe for this Glyph comes out of the inscription books dropped by Northrend bosses, and as such, the price can be relatively steep compared to other glyphs.
• discipline haste cap: 433 Haste Rating. You get 6% from Enlightenment and 25% from Borrowed Time. With Borrowed Time up, your GCD will be pushed down to 1 second, which is the farthest it will go.
• discipline priest best in slot and best disc priest gear: There are various schools of thought on that. I’ll try to post a list of my favorites among the current gear sometime this week.
• divine aegis: A shield that procs on a critical heal. It’s the “3D bubble” effect. Shields for up to 30% of the amount healed, stacks up to 10k damage absorbed. I still don’t know if it’s 10k total for a given aegis (if the total amount shielded reaches 10k, DA has to fall off before more crits will increase the amount shielded again) or 10k at any given time.
• discipline priest trinkets: You probably want Solace of the Defeated and Solace of the Fallen if you’re raiding endgame content.
• haste soft cap food: As above, the softcap is 433. You can bring that down to 393 if you want to use buff food like Imperial Manta Steak or Very Burnt Worg.

Actually, there’s one more I want to touch on:

• holy priest prayer of healing vs holy nova: POH is a more mana-efficient spell, and you can target it – Holy Nova is centered around you and doesn’t have as much range. But HN is instant; use it in a pinch, but not as one of your main healing spells. (Tip: Use Holy Nova in heroic Nexus when Grand Magus Telestra is throwing you around the room. You’ll heal your party and damage the boss!)

You may be aware that for the last couple weeks, I’ve been fighting a script-injection infection on etherjammer.com. Last weekend was the third in a row that I’d been infected, and I finally got annoyed enough to nuke the site to the ground. Nothing left except directories. I even destroyed the hidden files.

Today I’m finally bringing things back online.

You may notice some quirks as the blog reasserts itself. Things may not be as you remember them – I kept the posts and comments but couldn’t save the blog settings, so I’m reworking it from memory, and from changed tastes. I’ll be back in posting trim here soon enough. For now, I’m happy enough that I’m back at all.

Every other year, Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger runs a mini-workshop on blogging, called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. This year I’ve decided to participate, for both Duct Tape and Lost in Translation.

Day 1 of 31DBBB is Write an Elevator Pitch: a 30-second/150-word description of what the blog’s about. I was having trouble with this until I ran into a serendipitous error. Last week, I switched the address of this blog from http://www.etherjammer.com/wowblog/ to http://ducttape.etherjammer.com/; the ducttape. subdomain points at the /wowblog/ directory, so I didn’t think there would be any problem. Turns out, though, that some functions in WordPress rely on the address in the URL bar of your browser being correct to work properly; in particular, going to /wowblog/ just doesn’t work anymore – WordPress throws a 404 error! (Going to subpages, like /wowblog/feed/ to pick a random example out of the air, throws an Internal Server Error, which is even more fun.)

This isn’t a shaggy dog story, I promise. See, when you get the 404 error page from /wowblog/, you can click on the “go back to the main page” button at the bottom to get to ducttape., which solves the problem. But for some reason, this unsets the cookie that my What Would Seth Godin Do? plugin uses, and so I started seeing the tag at the top of the blog again.

In the WWSGD tag, as it happens, is an elevator pitch for Duct Tape and a Prayer.

Reproduced here, then, for your reading pleasure: the Elevator Pitch!

Welcome to Duct Tape and a Prayer, a World of Warcraft blog focusing on priests and healing, with occasional tangents into other classes and facets of World of Warcraft. In this place, in the words of Dr. Horrible, the status is not quo; my opinions can, do, and will differ from conventional wisdom, and I’ll do my best to back them up where I can. I welcome comments and discussion, but if you’re the sort of person who starts sentences with “Obviously…” or believes that there’s a One True Way to play the game, you might not be in the right place.

I’m considering a new site icon for this blog. Would you please tell me what you think of this?

Originally published here on 4/6/2008.

Yesterday, I wrote up an quick-and-dirty guild roster for my World of Warcraft guild on Boulderfist. There’s no styling at all; it’s just “here, output this table”. But it works just like I want it to: there’s a back-end script that fetches the data from the Armory once every night and feeds it into a mySQL database, and then a front-end page that fetches the data from the mySQL database on demand.

I guess the next step is to style it up and add AJAX; I’ve already got all the data pulled from the database, and it’s not changing (except once a day at midnight), so why not save myself some database calls and have the page update dynamically?

The whole thing has been a nice refresher on PHP (I wrote a very basic roster in PHP a couple months ago, and yesterday’s project was actually built on that, which is why I didn’t just do it in Ruby on Rails, my pet language/framework at the moment) and on web programming. I should do stuff like this more often.