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Recent Site Updates

May 31st, 2009 by admin

New Friend Sneaking Up Behind!

This WoWGrrl website has been my baby for a number of years, and has gone through a lot of upgrades, large and small.

I’ve now been writing here for upwards of four years, from the perspective of a number of , and have documented all types of adventures on the game.

Thanks to my awesome brother, I have a beautifully personalized design to my site. First he finds a great WordPress theme to start from, then he worked his magic to make it even better!

Updates Behind The Scenes

Some of my updates are ones that people can see right away, but some updates are more “behind the scenes” and if done right, aren’t even noticed when you run across them.

Things like information pages for various guides and services I’m offering, hoping to make other people’s game a little more fun and a little less tedious.

Or sign-up and confirmation pages for the initial World of Warcraft email lists I’ve set up so it doesn’t send you to a boring white “You Have Subscribed Successfully” page.

Or the WordPress plugins that I’m experimenting with.

I’ve also made changes to my RSS feed lately, by finally setting myself up with FeedBurner, and doing the .htaccess changes required to auto-forward my standard WordPress feeds off to the FeedBurner ones.

Riding the ROFLcopter

Updates To Thwart Feed-Leechers

While my brother was searching around recently, he found a site that is leeching complete feeds from bloggers such as myself, and putting a mass of advertising all around our content in an attempt to make money off of us.

I don’t plan to chase after these individuals as I know they’re impossible to suppress, so instead I made a few changes to my site to reflect their leechiness and try to make the best of the situation that I can.

First, I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’ve put a Watermark on the images I post on this blog from my own screenshots, now. Sure, I didn’t create the images or anything, but now if you see the “wowgrrl.com” Watermark on pictures on some other site, you know where it came from

My next strategy to work with this feed leecher is also highly noticable – I’ve started to link to my own entries at the top of each new entry, so anyone reading my entry from the leecher’s site will have my real entries to click through to. More opportunity to click through to the real author’s site the better, I figure!

Those reading my blog through RSS will have noticed another strategy I’ve put into place lately – Google Adsense ads on my own feed, so at least when it comes to my posts on this leecher’s site, there’s a chance they’d click MY ad instead of his

I Appreciate Feedback When Stuff Doesn’t Look Right

Throughout the changes, I’ve had the privilege of hearing from people through blog comments and Tweets through Twitter when things didn’t go as I had expected them to.

I really, truly and sincerely appreciate feedback of this type, because while I do try to test my changes, sometimes I feel I’m too familiar with my own site to properly test it out and not overlook the problems.

And yah, sometimes I just stick things into place and figure I’ll look at them again in a few days, and when I go back to them I cringe on my own!!

So to those who have already let me know of something that didn’t look right or was outright broken, thank you very much! To anyone else who saw something wrong/highly annoying and thought they might offend me by pointing it out, don’t worry about it!

Feel free to let me know your thoughts on anything when you’re reading this blog, but realize that it may take me a bit to respond to the suggestions I receive, and that’s nothing personal against you