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WoW Instant updated with new scoring engine, full MoP database up to patch 5.1 and more! →
Rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.
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Development Update
Howdy everyone, and sorry for not doing a blog update in a bit. Been busy working on another project that’s been soaking up a lot of my attention.
I’m currently working on Alpha 2 of Instant which will bring with it a pretty majorly overhauled interface, and includes fun things like item comparisons, character analyzation for upgrade suggestions and a spec breakdowns on item weighting for contributing factors like weapon speed. Stay tuned!
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Mists of Pandaria Announced! →
Looks like it’s going to be a pretty interesting expansion. Pandaren will be a playable race for both Alliance and Horde, a new Monk class that supports tanking, healing and dps, a major reconceptualization of the talent system, and a lot more. The new environments look beautiful, too. Can’t wait to get my hands on it!
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8/19/2011 Updates
- Fixed some issues for users on old Internet Explorer versions. I hate your browser, but I still love you.
- Temporarily removed comments until I can find a solution that doesn’t introduce so much rendering latency and JS errors in AJAX environments.
- Reworked Facebook/Twitter button placement.
- Improved page compression a bit.
- Removed some obsolete CSS references.
- Fixed some bugs with Collections.
I’m giving Project Wonderful a trial run, as it’s philosophy and community intrigue me greatly. It’s by the guy who does Dinosaur Comics, after all. It’s an advertising platform that caters more towards individual blogs/webcomics. You can advertise on WoW Instant for dirt cheap, if you’re looking for that sort of thing. Place a bid to help support my continued work on Instant.
P.S.: Deus Ex next week. I am excite.
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Mac users: Do you love Alfred as much as we do? Then you might want to check out this tip on making a WoW Instant custom search. Search for Warcraft items, spells and enchants anytime you want from anywhere in Mac OS X.
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Minor Updates
A couple minor updates to the site tonight.
1. Added ingame linking for items. You can find it next to the Collect button on item detail pages, like this one. Just copy and paste into Warcraft’s chat window to link the item to your guildies.
2. Fixed some issues with the new chat and social media buttons, in particular for those of you that use blockers for Facebook like Disconnect.
3. More improvements to performance! Optimize, optimize, optimize.I’m almost finished with the new Chrome browser extension, so look forward to that later this week.
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Updated: Comments, Crafting Recipe Improvements
Howdy everyone; hope you all had a great weekend. I just pushed some changes I’d done over the last week to the live server. As always, there were lots of behind the scenes changes, but there’s a few things I think you’ll immediately notice (and hopefully like!)
Comments are a big one. I’ve added Disqus-powered discussion threads on all item and spell detail pages as a trial. I like the idea of not burdening the server with a proprietary commenting system, and being able to load it in on demand after the page content is sent to the browser. It also has nice exporting tools that will make it easy to port everyone’s comments to another system if this doesn’t work out. It does add a little rendering overhead to the page though, so we’ll see how it goes.
Crafters will notice that most profession recipes now have required tool and reagent information, and crafted items now reference the recipe and profession used to create them. It’s a little rough still and I’ve noticed a few recipes aren’t getting picked up properly yet, but it’s a step in the right direction. Here’s an example page from the sandstone drake recipe.
As always, please let me know your thoughts and any feedback you might, and I appreciate your support. Tell your friends!
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Pets and Mounts
Lots of little tweaks over the past few days. In particular, you might find the new !pet and !mount bangs fun to play with.
Other changes:
* Added Webkit Speech Input support to the search box. If you’re running a recent version of Chrome you should see a new mic icon in the box; click it and speak. I don’t find it terribly accurate even for everyday terms let alone fictional fantasy world ones, but hey; it’s something fun to play with.
* Added IE9 jump list support.
* Swapped out the Facebook, Google+, etc. sharing buttons for a speedier version.
* Improved 404 handling
* Added support for external apps (like Alfred) to do searches.
* Updated sidebar with a few more quick search links, for simplicity sake.
* Added XML sitemap for search engine discovery.
* Tweaks to many of the page titles for readability/bookmarking. Weapons and armor now identify if they are PvP or PvE pieces in the page title, too.Check it out, and let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions over on Twitter. Thanks!
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Class Weight Changes
I’ve updated the class weight system on the site to better reflect tank priorities for Death Knights, Druids, Paladins and Warriors. Ratings should make a lot more sense for those particular classes now.
Lots of other minor tweaks to the site, most of it behind the scenes. Things are shaping up nicely, though. Please tell your friends!
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Updates and Tablet Improvements
Just pushed some changes that should make WoW Instant a much nicer experience on the iPad and Android tablets.
iPhone, iPod Touch and Android phone users are out of the luck for the moment, but we plan on bringing something very nice to you guys in the near future. ;)
[New] Added Google+ and Facebook Like buttons to pages.
[Fixed] Beast Mastery ratings not appearing in detail pages.
[Fixed] Shortcut keys are now ignored when used in conjunction with meta keys. (i.e. Command+R will now allow you to reload a page as intended.)
[Fixed] Detail frame no longer jumps up ~100px when you scroll in certain situations on iPad and lower-res displays.
[Fixed] Autocorrect disabled in search field on iOS devices for sanity sake.
[Misc] Preparation work for commenting.
