Yup, things have been evolving here at the old grove. I’ve been busy with a lot of things:

• As you may see, the new banner for the site is completed and size optimized for quick download, making the site display a bit faster.  I’ve cleaned up items in the sidebar on the right side of the page, made things flow a bit better as well.
• 00sage00 tweeted earlier this week that he activated the new mobile edition support for his blog (http://twitter.com/00sage00/status/5030443870).  He’s using the new version of WPTouch for WordPress (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch).  I like how his site looked on my iPod Touch and it convinced me to deploy it here.  So, if you are like me, someone who does a lot of blog reading on their iPod Touch, you will appreciate both the configuration improvements and the beautiful layout that makes reading on a iPod Touch a much more pleasing experience.
• I’ve deployed a the Simply Yearly Archive plugin for wordpress (http://www.schloebe.de/wordpress/simple-yearly-archive-plugin/#english).  It allows you to create a nice archive page for listing out all your posts.  I hightly recommend it!
• Alexia Morgan at The EVE Online Portal (http://www.evebloggers.com) and I have made the decision that keeping seperate OPML download files was not useful.  We have consolidated our efforts and as you can see, things are working out well.  Head over to and check out this resource, it’s a must for anyone who plays EVE Online!
• For those of you following blogging legislation, in the US, bloggers are now required to disclose if they have been compensated when they write an article for a product, service, website, et al.  DisclosurePolicy.org makes it very easy to write your policy for your blog with a Policy Generator tool. I do recommend that you head over there and read about the new law and how you can protect yourself from making a mistake.  I’ve added such a policy to my blog on my About page.

I’ve been busy as you can see, more to come soon!

Tags: Alexia Morgan, Blog Tools, Blogging, Disclosure Polcy, EVE Online, ipod touch, legislation, mobile edition, WordPress, WPTouch

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OMG.  I have been working a lot lately on websites for our corporation/alliance.  What have I been working on?  Well, let me see…

• Sorted out our forums, add the alliance section and another section for our first member corp, the Neo Catamites.
• Changing our killboard to an alliance killboard was removing some stats from some of our veteran pilots, so, I had to go and setup a separate alliance killboard (http://www.nspta.net/lacon) so that we could keep stats straight.
• Sort out the API keys for the API killmail pulls for the two killboards (thank goodness we have more than one director for that issue)
• Setup the feed syndication pulls for each killboard to update from all our sources (eve-kill, SHC Gank Night killboard, allies).
• Update our allies of the new alliance killboard from which to pull kills.
• Setup and sort out the various crontab jobs for the new killboard:  API Killmail pull, pricing data, feed syndication pulls, cache clearing and updating.
• Setup an ‘alliance landing page’ so that people have a single website to go to in order to access the forums and the killboards. (http://www.nspta.net/ls).
• Add links to the blogs for our pilots who do blog to the alliance landing page.
• submitted an article for approval on the EVE Online wiki for the new alliance.  Hopefully by the time you read this, it will be approved and available for your viewing pleasure (http://wiki.eveonline.com/wiki/Laconian_Syndicate).
• Updated and optimized the databases for the two killboards for the corp/alliance as well as my own personal killboard.
• Get all the plugins on my blog and Larkonis Trassler (http://www.larkonisforcsm.com) updated.  Clean up those databases as well.

With all that, I still went to work each day, found time to take care of stuff at home (not as much as I wanted to take care of), sleep and of course, play EVE.

From the founding of the alliance to getting everything done was four days.  It was a lot of work, but it’s well worth the effort.  Please feel free to visit the sites and if you see anything that I could be doing better, please let me know.

Tags: Forums, killboard, Laconian Syndicate, Neo Spartans, Out of Game, Player Blogs, WordPress

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We of the EVE Blog Pack have started a new feature, the profile post.  This is a posting to introduce many of you to our fellow bloggers and to give you some background on these fine people.

Name/Handle: Colonel Roc Wieler
Blog URL: Roc’s Ramblings at http://everamblings.wordpress.com
Faction: Minmatar Republic
Started EVE: 2006

What brought me here:
My love for science fiction has been something inspired in me since I first Star Wars at the theatre as a kid. I loved the richness of the mythology, the vastness of the universe; the true sense of wonder. So naturally, I played Star Wars Galaxies the day it came out. Played dedicated for five years. The last two years though, I noticed the game was continually being dumbed down. I hate dumbed down. I enjoy depth. Someone mentioned EVE Online to me, and well, been here ever since. Even gave up Star Wars for it, my childhood love.

Playstyle:
I am a Fleet Commander for the Tribal Liberation Force, as well as recently promoted to Fleet Commander in my corp, Freeform Industries. I do missions every now and then, but my real passion is the market. Both my alts are out of the box traders, and I really enjoy the cutthroat nature of doing business.  I’ve never mined, never even opened research or industry, and have never managed a corp. One step at a time.

What keeps me playing:
Ironically, there are two things. The first is that you don’t need to be here 23/7 for fear of missing out on some huge event. That flexibility combined with real time skill training (as opposed to mindless grinding) makes it great for me. During the week, I’m a casual player, and that’s just fine. The second reason I’ve already mentioned indirectly. Depth. Vastness. Mythology. EVE Online is so comprehensive that I am STILL catching up on my reading, just to absorb myself deeper into this universe we call home.

What I write:
My personal blog is all in character (with occasional exception). My approach to writing is a little different than most I am told. I tend to merge real life happenings with ingame happenings, with a bit of complete fantasy mixed in to throw you off. So far, it’s been fun. I am also a columnist over at http://www.eve-mag.com and hope to also get an article or two into EON Magazine. That would be something.

Other Interests:
I am also a co-developer for Capsuleer, the definitive iPhone application for EVE Online. I enjoy making 3D wallpapers as well, and have contributed some to the EVE Online galleries.

What you should know about EVE:
It’s intimidating when you start; overwhelming actually. It’s like learning a new Operating System and learning how to live in a completely new universe all at the same time. But stick with it, seriously. The rewards are worth it.

Tags: Alts, Blog Pack, Catching Up, CK's Blog Pack, EVE, EVE Online, Fiction, KG, POS, Star Wars, Training, Wallpapers, War, Wars, WordPress

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In an ongoing effort to improve my blogging experience, I continually evaluate different tools for WordPress based blogs.  As a result, I have changed some of the plug ins that I am using.  Below is an outline of the latest changes that I have put into operation here.  Hopefully there is something here that you may find useful.

Print a blog post.  If you click on the post title to read the whole post in a single page, you now have a new link at the top left side of the page, Print This Post.  Click on it and try it.  It gives you a nice, clean, printer friendly page, along with comments and any images you have embeded in your post.  It even gives you a nice a URL listing at the bottom of all the url’s that are embeded within your post.  You don’t have to print things often, but it’s a nice little plugin called WP-Print (http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wp-print) that makes this all possible.

Backup the Blog.  I have tested and tried out a better backup tool for WordPress, called WP-DBManager (http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wp-dbmanager).  This has a cleaner backup tool, but in addition, has some tools to optimize your database automatically as well as let you do things like drop tables, repair your database, etc.  These items are for advanced users, but if you run into an issue with a plugin that corrupts things and you need to clean things up a bit, this is a useful tool.

Who is commenting on your blog?  Meet your Commenters (http://www.berriart.com/meet-your-commenters) is a great tool to allow you to look at all the information people who are commenting on your blog leave behind.  You can identify all the posts they have commented on as well as any public information that they have avaible such as their blog url, their social networking links, etc…

Manageable (http://www.aaronharp.com/dev/wp-manageable).  A WordPress plugin that allows for inline editing of the date, title, author, categories, tags, status and more on both posts and pages without leaving the “Manage” admin sections. No need to load each post or page individually.  Simply double-click anywhere in the post or page row and when you’re done, press enter.  Alternately, you can click the link in the new “Edit” column.  This is a great tool, makes managing many posts, including changing your publishing schedule a breeze.

Tags: Blog Tools, WordPress

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I came across another widget for WordPress for Google reader shared items.  Check out this widget at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-reader-blogroll-widget/.  It’s easier to setup than my little sidebar javascript code and make the EVE Blog Pack look nicer.  I am using it right now, take a look at it in my sidebar.

Tags: Blog Pack, Blog Tools, Google Reader, Widgets, WordPress

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