Now, the new thing I discovered- Insert and Delete. If you haven’t rebound them from the default, if you press these while flying forward, you will be able to control your pitch- with no limit.
This allows you to do such awesome things as flying upside-down…

I’ll try to remember to add images later on, when I’m not blatantly violating company policy by using the internet for something not directly related to work… (Damn draconian internet use policy…)

Charm of Swift Flight (which will stay a trinket) now also reduces the mana cost of Flight Form and Swift Flight Form by 115 mana

Ok, cool…
Wait…
I use Outfitter to swap my trinket in when I shift to Swift Flight form, and then swap it back out when I shift out.
Meaning, I miss out on the mana reduction.

Personally, IF this story is accurate, and IF they make these affect the pally/warlock mount powers, then I’d like to see us lose the charm as a trinket, and instead have it simply “inscribe” our flight form power…

Well; I guess it all really depends on whether these are accurate or not. Once it’s confirmed, THEN druids can unite, possibly with our pally and ‘lock brethren, in a QQ-fest to shame all QQ-fests that came before… ^_-

Heh; but in all seriousness- it is a HUGE difference; epic flight really feels like FLYING- my flight form feels extremely sluggish, now.
Of course, that means it’s time to run my epic flight form quest chain… ^_^

Last night, Twain and I flew over half of outland, running from place to place; tomorrow, we plan on doing the Moonstone quest, and hopefully we can pull together a heroic Sethekk halls group to get Anzu… we’ll see…

It was quite smooth; disable plugins- check. Backup Database- check. Backup files- check. Wipe everything but my config.php, and plugins/itemstats/themes directories- check. Install the new files- check. Run the database upgrade- check.

It’s running beautifully, and most of my plugins are working fine. I had to replace a couple with updated competitors, but I’m quite liking it all. As an example, I’ve gone from an automatic database backup utility to a database utility with automatic backups, optimizations, and more… very nice!
The new backend is a beautiful thing; they’ve collapsed a lot of the options into nice, succinct tabs, with sub-options.

Looking at everything, I think the best way to do what I want with this post (Review 2.5/promote my favorite plugins) is to just go down my tab/option list… SO- With my plugins that create their own tabs, I have the following tabs/suboptions (I’ll give detail for the not-so-obvious ones)

• Write
  • Posts
  • Pages
  • Links- it’s nice to see this in the write section, instead of being a several-click task in the Manage Links section as before.
• Manage
  • Posts
  • Pages
  • Links
  • Categories
  • Tags
  • Link Categories
  • Media Library- a new one to me; apparently WP2.5 is including a built-in media library.\
  • Import
  • Export
  • Subscriptions
  • TinyMCE Advanced (Allows me to add/edit buttons on my TinyMCE interface with a drag and drop interface.)
  • Ad Units (From Adsense Manager; allows me to manage/define ads from various services and have them display where I want, on whichever pages I want. Very nice ad management interface.
• Design
  • Themes
  • Widgets
  • Theme Editor
  • AWP Management (Ajaxed Wordpress; the plugin that allows the inline post loading/commenting.)
• Comments - finally got it’s own tab; makes a lot of sense.
  • Comments- similar to the old Manage Comments page.
  • Akismet Spam
• cformsII - my Contact Forms plugin. Very powerful, quite nice… not exactly user-friendly, though, if you don’t like doing a little bit of minor code here and there.
• Database- my Wp-DBManager plugin
  • Database- all the info you ever wanted and then some about your database.
  • Backup Database- Create a backup, gzipped or no.
  • Manage Backup DB- Download, restore, delete, or e-mail a database backup. What’s nice about this tool is that it maintains backups indefinately, so you can have snapshots of your DB from creation/installation of this plugin onward.
  • Optimize DB- Mmmm… nice!
  • Repair DB- Very nice; I hope I never have to use this one!
  • Empty/Drop tables- Hoo… that’s a bit extreme, and I’m kind of shocked that that option is in here, but hey…
  • Run SQL Query- yeah; like I said, a rather powerful plugin.
  • DB Options
  • Uninstall.
• Gallery- my NexGen Gallery plugin.
  • Gallery- it’s got it’s own landing page, with plugin news.
  • Add gallery
  • Manage Gallery
  • Album- combine galleries into albums or slideshows, etc.
  • Options- Paths, thumbnail settings, watermarks, and more.
  • Style- modify the gallery CSS
  • Setup- reset all options, uninstall, etc.
  • Roles- what user roles have access to what options.
  • About
• Settings
  • General
  • Writing
  • Reading
  • Discussion
  • Privacy
  • Permalinks
  • Miscellaneous
  • All in One SEO- Search Engine Optimization
  • AA Google 404- Ask Apache Google -enabled 404 error pages.
  • FeedBurner
  • Google Analytics
  • Configure Postie- Significantly enhanced posting options.
    
  • Subscribe to Comments
  • WP Super Cache- I don’t have it enabled normally, but it uses both the normal HTML caching method, and a DB-to-HTML caching method that it claims makes you digg-proof on a shared host… if I ever get a digg, I guess I’ll test that…
  • Yadis- Use your WP Domain as an OpenID host by redirecting openid requests to an openID provider’s server.
  • AdSense Manager
  • XML-Sitemap- Creates an XML sitemap that allows better SEO.
• Plugins
• Users

Hoo; that was quite a bit more than I planned on posting…

Twailight is now Twailight, (currently balance) Resto druid, and I’m Coralin, Shadow priest. We’ve carefully designed our tradeskills to work well together; I’m mining/tailoring, and she’s skinning/enchanting. Granted, we have t rely on others for her crafted leather gear, but we’re getting a decent number of drops, so it’s all good so far. I’m level 15, with an equal amount of gold ^_-

Thanks, Cartographer_Mining and Cartographer_Routes!

I’ll post more, including armory stuff, when I get home… so long as I remember. >.<
(In related news- Clearly, I’m a terrible blogger, since I don’t stick to schedules, make promised posts, etc…)

I’m going to try and make this a weekly post, to be posted Mondays around noon-ish, Arizona time (Mountain Standard time- “Daylight savings time” is for chumps. ^_- ) actually post another one of these some time…

… As you can see, I’m running a bit late on the very first posting in the series, so that’s a good sign…

I thought I’d start with an addon that I feel is very poorly known and generally forgotten- EmptyBag.

(Also, you will note that images don’t display on my front page. I have no idea why, but yeah… so while I fight with Lightbox/ACE, you can open the post on it’s own page to see the mod in all it’s minimalistic glory…)

We’ve all had that moment of horror- you’re in an instance (or in the field, or anywhere, really,) and an item drops that you want. You win… but can’t find it in your bags- Crap! Your bags are full! “Well,” you think, “it’s time to start searching through the bags, trying to find something I can dump…”

But that will be difficult, seeing as the damn fool Fury warrior with the standard Fury-spec ADD just pulled another group. So there you sit, battling not only the mobs, but also your bags.
But hey- you won’t need to bother with that any longer, thanks to Empty Bag!

EmptyBag gives you a single, movable, lockable button that displays the cheapest item in your inventory, so long as it’s not Blacklisted. (More on the “blacklist” in a sec.) The icon itself has three main functions; click to delete the item displayed (or sell it if you’re at a merchant,)
Right-click to temporarily skip the item (until you’ve cycled through all potential deletions), and middle-click to add the item to the custom blacklist.

Speaking of the Blacklist- there are actually a few different “blacklists” in the mod; a couple can be modified from the GUI, so let’s start there- to access the (rather basic) GUI, enter the /ebconfig command.

Well; Hide and Lock are pretty straightforward; hide the button, lock it in place. (Also accessed with /eb lock, /eb unlock and /eb show, /eb hide)

Safety bags- this setting lets you designate certain bags (Ok, so a certain # of bags starting from the left…) as a part of the blacklist; any items in these bags are counted as blacklisted. (I’ve never used it, so I don’t know how well it works, nor can I provide slash commands.)

List Items displays the custom blacklist; this list is both items that you have middle-clicked, and any items you’ve manually added.

As you can see… you don’t have to specify REAL items… ^_- (You can manually add items with /eb additem [item goes here].)

The remaining options are really rather straightforward; you can set it so that items of a certain quality or greater will ALWAYS be blacklisted;similarly, it comes with pre-made categories, so you can simply choose to never delete pots, or drinks, or food, etc.

One nasty little caveat that will mean a lot of middle-clicking- the last time this mod was updated was pre-ish-BC (Meaning Feb 1st, 2007,) so the categories? Yeah, they don’t include BC or later items.

Still, I’d heartily recommend this mod; it’s a part of my “standard install” package.

Next week month-ish, I’ll be posting about Trinity Bars, unless I’m distracted, or bored, or just too dang lazy…

Heck; Trinity bars is going to be a big one… I’m thinking that I’ll split it into multiple weeks, so you may well actually get next week’s post on time… Nice!

Necessary Ingredients:

Soda Water
Ice cream, preferably both Vanilla and a flavor of your choosing.
Flavored syrup.

1. Fill the cup about 1″ full of Soda water (Remember, we’re working with a standard-sized restaurant cup; so modify amounts to match YOUR chosen vessel)

2. Add a “decent amount” of your selected flavored syrup to the soda water- generally, around a tablespoon or more. You’re flavoring a full glass, not just what’s in there now.

3. Take a small spoonful of the vanilla ice cream (around 1-1.5 tsp), and stir the syrup, vanilla ice cream, and soda water together. It may well look like something you do NOT want to drink. That’s fine- I’ll take it, if you don’t want it. Well, so long as you aren’t using some weird flavor… let’s leave those in the roaring ’20’s where they belong… heh.

4. Add more soda water, ’till the cup is about 1/2 way full, and stir to combine.

5. Add a scoop or two of the Ice Cream flavor you have decided to use as your float, then add soda water until the glass is as full as you’re comfortable with.

6. Eat, Drink, and get fatter, for tomorrow, we exercise. Actually, tomorrow’s no good for me. How about next week some time?

Yep, it’s essentially a “home-made” “Cream soda”/Ice cream float. But damn, is it good. And since you’re using flavored syrups, you can get some awesome combinations that you just can’t get if you rely on pre-flavored sodas.

My favorite? Chocolate soda and a Mint ice cream. ^_^