Its been ages since I had any time to write here, but with dual workloads of 40+ hours per week I find it hard to find time to write anything here. This means that this blog is in need of fresh blood to help manage things around here.

So, if you have an interest in Diablo 3 and feel that it would be fun to blog about it, please let me know and I will talk things over with you and give you some space to conduct some testposting on before accepting you as a full editor.

I have the good fortune to announce that we have been given permission to host the Diablo 3 based Fiery Runes wallpapers from HolyKnight3000, who is also a member of DiabloIIIBlog.com now. You find all of his work in the gallery and can keep up to date with new creations through the forum.

Enjoy!

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I have had busy days with having a birthday (yay, I am now even OLDER than before…), taking my son for a swim and generally enjoy the good weather and of course creating the new design, so I completely forgot about my IP ban and the result my contact with Blizzard had.

On Friday the 25th I got a letter from a Blizzard employee and then a letter from WoW account management regarding my letter that I sent to both and I got the usual stockreplies about how you can get banned from rapidly logging in and out of battle.net and joining and leaving games very often and so on.

Normally I get pissed when people send me stock replies that have no relation to my letter and as this kind of information really have no point since I wrote that I had just installed the game and was blocked before I could even create an account and in the case of my letter from WoW account manager where they told me they could not help me because there was no account with the email used to send in the letter (how could there be when I could not get online to register an account?) I just shook my head at the stupidity of the people sending out these useless letters, presumably without even reading the actual letter.

The letter from David at Blizzard was also a stockreply, but there was something about it…maybe  how the reply was written or if I was just in a good mood, but I did not get angry or resignated, but sent a reply about my situation again. David was kind enough to look into the matter and while he could not say why I had been banned he could tell me that my ban would last for another 5 days, which means that I’ll be cleared to go online again on thursday. This may seem like a small thing, but for me it means that I now know when the accursed ban will end and have something to look forward to, so thank you for that David.

I fully understand that people at support drown in questions and requests as I am myself spending much time in support for my business as webhost and webdesigner, but to send out a stockreply without reading a letter or at least modify it so it fit the question or worse yet questions so that all questions get answered! Failing that you should get yourself a new job as you will only make people angy as they think you ignore or disregard them.

As you can see the new Diablo 3 wordpress theme is starting to take place and is now the default design for this website.  Things are still not 100% and I need to customize many more areas before I am happy with how things look, but at least its usable. I have taken great ains in making this design widget-ready, which is a little troublesome at first.

I will focus on some other projects for a while, but this project will have my attention as far as posting goes, even if the design bit will have to sit back for a while. I especially need to re-design the forum that I have done pretty much nothing with it so far other than just change a few things here are there.

I hope you like it so far.

I am going to start on the new Diablo 3 design for diabloiiiblog.com today since I feel I want to get a flying start with it. I will begin by adding the “wrapper” as soon as possible and then the actual postbit. The sidebar will be a simple version where I will try not to poke things to much so it can remain widget friendly and the footer I will ponder on later as I am sure I want to add something down there as well eventually

I am preparing some advertising spots for the future (you never know) with a 468×60 adspot below each post, a 720×90 spot in the footer, a 300×250 spot in the sidebar and I will try a plugin for random adspots as well. It may sound like a bit to much, but I want to see how it looks and if its not working I’ll remove the areas that are not working.

Feedburner get alot of attention with graphic spots for RSS for posts as well as comments along with a feedburner counter. I am also going to add Technoracti features and work on making the social services sections a bit nicer.

When its in place I’ll start working on the details a bit, like fixing the gallery and the forum so it will look nice and bland with the new design.

It will take a while to get this done since I am home with my son, but I will at least have something to show by the weekend. If you want a sneak preview, please post a comment and I’ll give you a link to see the work in progress.

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I finally caved in and added a gallery. There are a million galleries out there, but I figure it might not be a bad idea to add this feature here as well since its useful when showing off things graphicly and since everyone else have it…why not add it here as well?

I will start with the official images and then build from there I think. I have plans to make some wallpapers and then there will be a few images for the chronicles of course.

I am in final stages of the new layout and will hold on any redesign issues until that is done, but I will make some adjustments once the new layout is in place…I always do

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Today I continued the word of implementing the items on the guide “WordPress SEO - Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog” which today included setting up the possibility to subscribe to comments directly and to take the step over to Twitter, which I have to admit is rather amusing so far all alone (please join me or I will go mad!). This done I also added my latest “Twitterings” as a widget so you can follow more easily.

I have also completed the setup for Feedburner so that the RSS feeds are parsed through their service and make it easy to signup for latest posts in the mail (email that is, not snailmail) and started to add the social services features so its easy to add to your favorite service.

If you want to stay on top of what happens here you can follow the diabloiiiblog.com Twitter stream or subscribe to diabloiiiblog.com’s RSS feed here. You can also subscribe to get notifications through email here.

For those that are addictive to RSS feeds you also have multiple choices for subscribing to different areas of the forum including an overview RSS feed for all activities, Forum based RSS feeds and down to feeds for individual topics…all to make you stay on top of what happens there.

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I am locking this wordpress theme for now in order to have a design that works, more or less, until O can place my new design in place. This is mostly so I can start setting up the new forum without having it look like hell depending on what theme you choose.

The new theme that will be in place in a few weeks (fingers crossed) is a very light and simple skin that I hope you will like. It will have some Diablo 3 elements, but still be able to be used for multiple purposes so anyone can download and use on their own blogs.

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Until the free Diablo 3 wordpress theme is ready I have added a few other free wordpress themes and included the theme switcher plugin so you can choose a theme that you find to your liking.

All themes are available to be downloaded for free should you want one for your own wordpress blog.

Building for the future…

Setting up a blog is pretty easy, but once setup you need to go over what plugins you want to use (and they are as many as the stars in the sky!) and also how to optimize the blog for best performance. For me this is something I do alot lately as I am building several new websites with the Wordpress as CMS solution, but I thought I should give some ideas as to what I will be doing in the next couple of week…besides posting that is.

The first I will do is to go through the excellent guide to optimize a blog from “WordPress SEO - Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog” which pretty much go over all you need to do in order to get better visibility and rankings on the searchengines.

After that, or more likely at the same time, I will try to find some time to poke the Diablo 3 free design template and make it into a wordpress theme for use here. In order to do that however I need to ensure it has all the legal aspects correctly placed and that Blizzard, who own the rights to the graphics, are ok with how their property is used.

That done I will figure out what plugins I want to use and how it will be implemented into the design before I can finally cut the graphics up and build a design from it. If/when I get it done I plan to release it as a free Diablo 3 wordpress theme. It may be slightly different from the free version however to set this design apart a bit, but we’ll see.