Spring cleaning the inn

The spring sun has arrived and is relentlessly exposing the lack of window cleaning activities in my home. While the mothers of the neighbourhood are polishing frenetically, I shrug. I look at the grey shade on the window, thinking: “it isn’t too bad. After all it helps out to filter the annoying sun reflections so I get a better view on the screen.” Yeah. I’m a bad, bad woman.

But nevertheless: spring has arrived and that means that it’s about time to do some cleaning at The Ping Pigtail Inn as well. I’ve had my home in those premises for eleven months now, and it has become quite untidy in the corners. It isn’t anything revolutionary stuff going on, just small adjustments, so please keep enjoying your beer and posts and don’t worry too much about it.

If you’re curious about what’s been going on without your noticing I thought I’d point it out and also give some proper credit for the work.

The rescuing knight
The knight that has suddenly come to my rescue in this matter is the in every aspect outstanding, awesome WoW blogger Ixobelle. A little while ago he wrote to me and suggested that I should move the author names so that they come before the posts, in order to avoid confusion about who has written them, now that I have a bartender. I replied that I’d like to and that I had tried to, but that I for some reason couldn’t make it work, and that I unfortunately had no clue about html writing.

“I’ll help you out” he said. And so he did. And while he was still at it, he also helped me with an old issue, which has been bothering me since last autumn: the fact that whenever a Blogger based blog linked to my blog in a blogroll, the link went to an old post, unless they linked to my Feedburner address. Now that problem is solved and I don’t have to write individually to every single blogger who is kind enough to link to me, explaining why the link doesn’t work.

And as if this wasn’t enough he offered to help me to make a little icon for the blog. So if you look closely in the address field of the blog you’ll find a smallish pink pigtail.

Broken blogroll
Finally Ixobelle suggested that I should give the blog a proper domain name. I had thought it was rather complicated – it turned out that it wasn’t. So from now on you’ll find me at http://pinkpigtailinn.com/. The old address will continue to work though, so it’s no panic to change it.

As a side effect of this it seems as if my blogroll has disappeared. I don’t know if I’ll be able to restore it the way it was or if I’ll have to rebuild it manually. If it’s the later, it will take me some time, since I don’t read blogs through any reader, but through my blog roll. I’ll have to try to recall them all and probably I’ll fail on a few. So please, if you know that you were linked on my roll and don’t find your blog linked here again in a few days, please throw me a letter and I’ll put you back! Don’t take any offence. Some blogs have trade marks that I can recall without any help, some haven't, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t read and appreciate them.

By the way, Ixobelle did another great thing for The Pink Pigtail Inn and a bunch of other blogs on his blogroll. Instead of just providing a link, he has made personal, unique thumbnails for each one of the blog. I so proud and thrilled to see mine that I just have to publish it here so that you’ll all will see it, in case you’re not one of Ixobelle’s regular readers.

Did I tell you he is awesome? Not enough many times. So I say it again. Ixobelle, you are my hero.

The state of the blog
A few final words about the state of the blog. The last few weeks I’ve had a few posts which have been heavily commented, partly thanks to some link love from WoW Insider. It’s nice and very much appreciated; however it’s a little bit overwhelming. I’ve always tried to answer almost every single comment, and that works well when you have 5-10 comments at the most, but not as well when there’s 39 of them. If you have commented and not got a personal reply, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t read and appreciate the comment. I really, really do.

To be honest it feels a bit weird to get all this attention. Gaining a big audience has never been a big blogging motivator for me, but suddenly I find myself with over 500 subscribers. I guess it’s a sign of the time we’re living in. Established WoW bloggers are now quitting almost every day. Gnomeaggedon hasn’t quit yet, in spite of all the little pranks he’s currently playing us. But many others have and I guess that this means that their readers are looking for new blogs to get their daily dose of WoW-related blog reading. Some of them end up here.

To all of you who have started to frequent PPI recently, I can just say: welcome and have a seat! Feel free to poke around a bit among my old writings! I’ve written over 300 posts by now and actually most of them are rather timeless, since I don’t engage myself that much into news from the PTRs and such. When I look back at my first posts I can see that my perspective has shifted slightly, after I’ve gained more raiding experience. But the essence is pretty much the same and I don’t regret any of my earlier writings. So if you think that my posting is slower that you’d like, it could be an idea to try some of the vintage brews while waiting for the new ones to arrive.