MMeOw and BBCode Tooltips

Tony posted this on April 17th, 2009. It has 2 Comments »
Categorized as News.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1513

Tur­bine now allows you to use their Lore­book data for item and equip­ment tooltips on your own site. I thought this was a great thing and wanted to set it up here. The only prob­lem was that enter­ing an exact link to a page on the Lore­book every sin­gle time I wanted to cite some­thing seemed like a bit much. It also meant that it was made extra dif­fi­cult for any­one who com­mented that isn’t famil­iar with HTML.

To get around this I found a nice plug-in that allows this site to use BBCode for this pur­pose. This means that the sys­tem used on this site (in the con­tent and the com­ments) is the same as used on the offi­cial LotRO forums. I’d sug­gest read­ing that post to get the idea.

So now I can do this: [Coal] with­out writ­ing any HTML at all.

If you run a site and want help set­ting this up, just let me know. It doesn’t work in com­ments by default, but the maker of the plug-in was nice enough to help me out there.

Encyclopedia Maleficarum

Tony posted this on March 12th, 2009. It has No Comments »
Categorized as Editorials and Thoughts.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1315

holly-troll-warrior

I don’t con­sider myself the author­ity on LotRO infor­ma­tion by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion, so writ­ing guides suited to the pur­pose of the Lore­book is kind of beyond me.

That said, there have been quite a few things I’ve added so far. Most of these have been basic infor­ma­tion on equip­ment I’ve found and ene­mies I’ve chopped apart. It’s actu­ally been fun to do so far .… Kind of like I’m on an expe­di­tion cat­a­loging what’s out there. I just need a Pokédex.

Read the rest of this entry »

Love the Lorebook

Tony posted this on March 9th, 2009. It has 1 Comment »
Categorized as Editorials and Thoughts, News.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw1274

lorebook_advocacy

Mike over at Under the Ban­ner wrote a great post on some­thing some of us LotRO blog­gers (there’s more and more of us lately!) thought deserved more atten­tion: the Lore­book.

As you likely already know, LotRO lacks a great third party data­base akin to WoW’s Wow­head. Sure, there’s Allak­hazam and LotRODB, but nei­ther are con­sis­tently updated or easy to use. Tur­bine offers very lit­tle in the way of web­mas­ter sup­port com­pared to Bliz­zard, which is likely a good part of the reason.

On the flip­side, Tur­bine offers its own inclu­sive Lore­book wiki sys­tem that is meant to pick up the slack. Unfor­tu­nately, this sys­tem is only as good as what play­ers put into it. As of late, it has seemed like there’s been less and less moti­va­tion for many to add to it. I cer­tainly under­stand that sen­ti­ment and am not out to blame peo­ple for it (it’s not like I’ve been a force in that regard :) ).

How­ever, many of us seem to be in agree­ment that we have to work with what we have. The Lore­book des­per­ately needs atten­tion. Any player out there likely has some­thing to add, whether its addi­tional details, images of equip­ment or updates on skills. Many things that have been added through the Mines of Moria expan­sion are still not present in the Lore­book and with the upcom­ing release of Book 7, things are just going to get worse.

Mike had some basic rec­om­men­da­tions that I wanted to also post here: Read the rest of this entry »

“What We Wish Other People Knew” Guides

Tony posted this on August 7th, 2008. It has No Comments »
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw230

LotRO Guide

The Lord of the Rings forum front page has been fea­tur­ing a player made guide each week and this one is no dif­fer­ent. These guides are all avail­able in the pretty awe­some Lore­book, but some of them  deserve spe­cial attention.

This week’s fea­ture is actu­ally sev­eral guides, all which were com­piled by Mosby (aka Beleg the Saga­cious). They’re enti­tled “What We Wish Other Peo­ple Knew” and each deals with a spe­cific class.

Each offers sev­eral tips and exam­ples of what to do in more com­plex sit­u­a­tions. I’ve not read through them all, but I have found times (par­tic­u­larly in small groups) where I wasn’t pos­i­tive what was expected of me. These pretty much clear it up for every­one. Be sure to check them out.