Leafshine: Lust for Flower

Technical Fault: Comments

Just a quick apology to anyone who has left a comment here recently. There's a technical problem at my blog host's end that means that names on comments are not correctly showing as links through to the commenter's blogs.

I'm assure that Typepad engineers are "working on it", and that the missing URLs will be restored soon.

Apologies about that. 

Reminder: Hell, No, We Won't Go

Just a reminder that I'm generally a "spoiler-free" player. I don't go on the test realms, and I try to avoid anything but the most basic information about patches until they go live on the servers.

So, this blog will most certainly NOT be your source for all things 3.1-related. :)

The Top 10 Leafy Posts of 2008

So, 2008 is done. It was the first full year of this blogs's life (I started in late 2007), and it's been a pretty good year, despite some very patchy posting in the summer, due to my Mum's death and some guild drama that followed it, and the end of the year, due to general exhaustion.

Interesting, this blog now has 50% more RSS subscribers than One Man & His Blog, my 5 year old main blog, but consistently gets lower page views. That suggest, I think, that the WoW audience is generally more web-savvy than the audience for material about the interaction of blogging and journalism. I'd like to see more people clicking through from feed readers and joining in the debates in comments on all WoW blogs, not just this one, but I've no idea how we can make that happen.

Anyway, onto the most popular 10 posts of 2008, ranked by page views:

1. Bloggers Against the Lifebloom Nerf - Back in February, druids (and those hoping to be healed by druids) were up in arms about a proposed nerf to Lifebloom. This was my rallying post to campaign against it, and we won. Eventually, Lifebloom did get nerfed, but as part of a complete revamp of our healing, so nobody minded as much.
2. Are Resto Druids up to Healing Heroics? - A really nasty Slave Pens run lead me to wonder wether Resto Druids were really up to healing Heroics, and the constant search traffic for this entry suggests that I'm far from the only person to wonder that. And then Blizz gave us a proper rez and another group heal, and the doubts went away.
3. New Wrath of the Lich King info - What About Druids? - Back in March I speculated about some nice things druids might get in the expansion. And people searching for info on Druids in Wrath kept arriving at my (wrong) guesses. Poor them. 
4. World of Warcraft is a Social Operating System - I think this was my best post of the year. A long, and considered (for me) post about the success of WoW, and the social factors that now give it a degree of stability in the top spot. Maybe I should write more serious, thoughtful stuff like this. :)
5. Guild Drama and Server Changes - Grabbing something positive out of the absolute low point of my gaming year. About a month after my mother died, some idiotic, socially-inept (and now former) guildies made it impossible for me to stay in the guild I co-founded. I ended up taking a couple of months on a different server - and, in effect, a couple of months off playing. That period of my life was so unhappy, even seeing that post again brings me down. 
6. Don't Nerf Trees: Thanks to Team Tree - a list post of all the bloggers who carried the anti-Lifebloom nerf badge.
7. Installing Wrath of the Lich king: What to Expect - I'm amazed to see this in the top 10. It's just a series of screen grabs of the install process for Wrath. The things people like…
8. Druids vrs BRK: First Blood - in which the weight of bear, tree and laser chicken brings down the Big Red Kitty server. That, or the dodgy bits in the Wordpress code. :)
9. Wrath of the Lich King Collectors Edition Unboxing - A video, which one of my guildmates recently described as "shit". The traffic figures suggest otherwise.
10. The Curse of the Enchanter - In which I complain about a mailbox full of material to disenchant, which WoWInsider than follows up on. It's interesting how few WoWInsider readers actually click through to source blog posts, though…

Happy (Belated) Blogday to Me!

One year ago, yesterday, Leafshine: Lust for Flower was unleashed on an unsuspecting WoW-blog reading public. Readers flocked here in their 10s, buoyed by the useful information found on sites like Pesto4Life, Big Bellicose Buffoon Blogger and the like, expecting more well-written, useful content. (Although some people came here from Feed More Page, mainly because I made licentious suggestions about Ratters and beards. But that's another story entirely.)  And they have been recoiling in horror at the half-arsed mish-mash of irrelevance and all out nonsense that's been pouring out of the small, insipid organ that's called my brain ever since.

And yet, mysteriously, I now have hundreds of RSS subscribers and tens of thoudands of page views. There can only be one conclusion: there's a significant subset of WoW players who have no taste at all. And I love every single one of your for your total lack of taste. :-)

The blog was (quite literally) two years in the making, with the name and idea sorted out pre-Burning Crusade. Two short-lived false starts later, I finally buckled down and got on with it last September

And here and now, I make a commitment to you: I shall continue to waste your precious time with more flippancy, irrelevance, stupid photos and sudden, unexpected long, rambling essays for at least another year. I am so very good to you, aren't I?

Thank you for your attention. You may now return to your regulalrly scheduled Wrath launch date announcement frothing.

Wrath of the Lich King: Spoiler Free

Ladies, Gentleman and Hunters.

Thank you for coming. I have an announcement to make. From now, until the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, this blog will be a Wrath-free zone.

I'm not a big fan of spoilers. I like to be surprised by new areas as I enter them. I like quests to be a genuine surprise. If possible, I do instances spoiler-free, so as to capture the excitement of the unknown. As far as possible, I want to come to Northrend with fresh eyes, the second the EU realms come up on launch day. And so, I won't be joining the Beta, I won't be reading spoilered blog posts and I most certainly won't be posting any beta-specific information here. For the time being, this is a Burning Crusade blog and proud!

Let's face it. You're not short of spoilerific blogs to choose from if you want a good regular dose of expansion spoilers to keep coming your way. Here, I'll be concentrating on making the most of the game in the months before the expansion launch, and we all dive into another 10 level grind...

New Look!

For those of you coming in via RSS, you might like to know that Lust for Flower has a new look!

I've been using Typepad's in-built themes for a while, but I really craved a nifty custom look of my own. And now I have it! What do you guys think?

A Leafy Silence Falls

Quiet around here, isn't it?

Nothing but the distant rustling of the trees and a few abandoned anti-Lifebloom nerf banners to entertain you. The problem is that I'm away on family business and without Internet access most if the time. In fact, I'm busy tapping out this entry on my iPhone using the handy-dandy Typepad iPhone interface, and will post it using the standard mobile phone network.

I do have a couple of posts ready to go on my MacBook, but a notable absence of WiFi means they won't get posted until tomorrow lunchtime at the earliest. So, um, talk amongst yourselves for a little bit. I'll be back soon...

Leafshine: Lust for iPhone

Hello, yes, still alive and willing to share this great new feature for this blog!

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, and you add a bookmark to this blog to your home screen, you'll get a lovely Leafy icon, right there on your device.

Woo!