Matt Shooks

My daughter is now 2.5 months old. Things are settling down quite a bit and the last couple of weeks I have been working on an update to my guild's website. I hadn't touched the page in 2 years and it was starting to show. I'll be writing a couple of articles on it as I took the oportunity to do a couple of news things. Most notable was the change to using Blueprint CSS Grid for layout. I was pretty happy that I was able to get the layout identical on Firefox 3, IE 7/8, Chrome 1/2 and Safari on a Mac. I will also be writing a couple articles on the various WoW news services and how to integrate and cache the information in ColdFusion and how to use the RealmStatus XML.

The World of Warcraft Armory site has not been updating for many members of my guild recently. Sometimes the information is out of date and sometimes there is no information at all. Blizzard has confirmed an issue with the Armory data and states that an upcoming maintenance to the servers this week should fix it.

I was asked question on how to retrieve item information in my World of Warcraft Armory Data Item Update entry and thought I would give a couple of ideas here. There are a couple of ways that I can see doing this and it really depends on your setup and intent for the data. If you want to mine all the data the item-info.xml takes in one parameter which is i and is an unique integer value for the item. Taking a quick look at my profile the highest value is 33522 and my lowest value is 5976. So you could easily setup a loop to loop from 1 to 40000 and should get the majority of items. The thing to note is this will get you every item including vendor trash. Another approach would be to only retrieve item data for items that you are using in your dataset. For instance a small guild site where the web host might limit the size of a database. To pull this information, I would use the character profiles of the guild. Items appear in several places on the character-sheet.xml. Specifically they are in the item node under the attributes gem0Id, gem1Id, gem2Id and id. Building off of the character sheet will reduce the total size of the item inventory. This method does require a little more maintenance. For instance patches that change items or when players stop equipping items that have already been recorded. So wiping the dataset periodically would not be a bad idea.

I hit a milestone this week on my Paladin. Last night we dropped Nightbane and for my first time since we have been clearing Karazhan for 6 months now, the breastplate drops. The irony is badge 74 and 75 dropped off him. So I passed to our warrior who had also been waiting a long time for it too. I picked up the Chestguard of the Stoic Guardian in town and gemmed it with the gems I had on reserve. The upgraded moved me from 14.9k health to 15.3k. I still have to get the 150 health enchant and that will take me to 15.5k health unbuffed. My next focus will be to add a little more spell damage to help with threat.

The World of Warcraft Armory has gotten a shortened URL. You can now use http://www.wowarmory.com/ instead of the longer http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com. With the update they also improved on the size of some the XML files and made some structure changes to the XML.