Tuesday, October 23, 2007

What's the deal with my blog roll?

In general, I have a reciprocal blog roll. Meaning that if you put my link on your blog and I like your blog, I will return the favor. I would love to go out and find additional blogs to put on here, but I just have not found the time. However I have a growing collection of colleague that have found me or vice versa and I am happy to post their links and give you a thought or two about them in hopes that you visit them.
What can you say about BRK? He is the Grand-daddy of all Hunter blogs. I found BRK when I was thinking about switching to Beast Mastery and I was looking for some sample builds. BRK's blog sealed the deal and inspired me to create my own. I also really like how BRK has a great mix of fact, opinion and bluster. BRK was also the first person to ever comment on this blog and that really, really made me feel great. To date BRK has yet to add me to his "Good WoW Blogs" link list (just an oversight I am sure), so he is in danger of dropping off this list, but he did link to me once and drove a bunch of people here. so he still has a long grace period in my blog roll.
Exanimo and I seem to have a very similar blogs and a similar process to blogging. We use our experiences to help and entertain our readers. He sent me my very first email and asked if we could swap links. I checked out his blog and I liked it, plus his story of getting hacked so much mirrored my own that I felt we had a little brotherhood right then and there.
So, being a vain person, I look at my sitemeter, to see it rise and check referring pages. Girl Meets WoW popped up once or twice on that list, but when I went to her sight, I could not find the link -- I searched for the words "n00b" "eternal" nothing came up on the page, so I figured she had a link and got rid of it because I had offended her in someway. I, of course, was a n00b and did not see her ultra cool blog roll that consist entirely of images. I will say the site is not what I would have expected, "gaming insights from the perspective of a 24 year old girl" is how the site is describe, but the work is in depth, informative and detailed enough that it would not matter if a 55 year old Martian wrote it -- it is just good reading!
How can you not like a blog named Gun Lovin' Dwarf Chick? Of course, here's a little secret for you... that gun lovin' chick? She sports a crossbow. The same one I have. She might be gun lovin, but she ain't gun totin'! That quibble aside Breana has created a nice, cozy place for people to enjoy themselves and maybe learn a little somethin' or two.
I have a feeling that Aaren will not be posting for awhile, he is in some deep dark place known as MLB Playoff hell! How the Indians blew a 3-1 game lead is probably playing terrible havoc with his brain. Having gone through the same thing in 1979 with the Orioles and the Pirates, I understand where he is coming from. When he does come out of his funk he will write some interesting stuff for Warlocks and for all of us WoW lovers in general.
This is my friend Brian's blog. (The person who introduced me to Warcraft.) His blog is not strictly WoW related because he talks about his real life work as well. He is an HTML programmer and his blog seems to be filled with, as best I can tell, made up words and gobblety-gook. When I pointed this out to him he said, "Um, hello?! I do work for a living and occasionally want to share a little of what I know about the subject. Seriously, if someone else had made this post it would have saved me about 2 hours of work. =D" But really the man knows and studies his stuff but if you want to just check out the WoW stuff use this link.
Kestrel has a link on his main page to "recommended" Blogs, in which he describes my blog thusly: "I think we were separated at birth. Or something. A NE Hunter who thinks he’s always a step (or two) behind the pack. Fun reading!" Kestrel is a confirmed casual gamer and gives very good advice about how to play the game from that point of view. On his main page he has "5-star" links to the top blogs, I'm happy to be recommended, but wouldn't it be great to be a "5-star" blog!
This was a another sitemeter discovery, following their link to me. Jon (just the way I spell my name!) and Shellbi are documenting their rise as a pair of Blood Elf Hunters through the ranks of levels after taking a 6-month break from WoW. I have yet to see any parenting advice (as the name seems to imply) so we'll keep looking for that as we follow their adventures.
Edit: Jon & Shelbi have moved their website, so please adjust accordingly: www.thebronzekettle.comIf BRK is the Grand-Daddy of all hunter blogs, Mania is our mother. Mania runs Petopia, for which if you are a hunter and you do not visit petopia early and often -- shame on you! (It's like a hunter running around without a ranged weapon.) Her blog is also a fount of information and she is great at keeping up with changes in the wowiverse (not just about pets) and reporting them promptly on her blog. Mania was the second person to post a comment and the first person to link to my blog, so I am also eternally grateful to her.
Much to my chagrin, I haven't spent a whole lot of time on Pelides' site. Mostly because I only recently found it and I have a back-log of posts to read to catch up, but what I have read, I do enjoy.
So if BRK is daddy & Mania is mommy, I would like to introduce you to Aunt Lassira. Very informative and keeps you interested. Without a doubt one of the top hunter blogs out there. Unlike BRK, Lassira is not as focused on Beast Mastery, so you can get a lot more general information from her.
This is my friend John's WoW blog. He just left our guild so I'm gonna be pissy and not say much about his blog!
If you have found this blog and do not know about WoW Insider. Please stop reading now and go there. I go to WoW Insider for news three to four times a day. I get much of my info and news from there -- it is indispensable.

4 comments:

Girl Meets WoW said...

Yeah, I thought blog rolls get so long and dull, why not give people something aesthetically pleasing to look at. Glad you found it eventually!

Exanimo said...

Guess BRK makes a habbit out of not putting up links in return (as he did say he would).. but i suppose he doesn't really need the traffic from our sites when looking at his :)

As his is one of the first Wow-blogs i found (besides wowinsider which feeds my addiction on a daily basis) and actually inspired me to start mine he's still linked, the lucky sod. :P

shelbi said...

hey hey! how awesome to see that we're linked (l2parent). but we've decided to rip the wow out of that blog and move it to our guild site (which i created a long time ago). kind of hard to mix the two together - it was like a big mess of posts.

anyway, if you could change the link to www.thebronzekettle.com we would appreciate it! :)

Hershey said...

MLB Playoff Hell is right, my friend. Stupid playoffs. Stupid Indians. Argh! /cast Curse of Doom on all of them!

Anyways, thanks for the link. I don't always comment on the blogs in my blogroll, but I enjoy the ever-loving crap out of each and every one of them. And this one is no exception. Keep up the great work.