I'm going to be heading up north to go mushroom picking until the end of october so, no internet and no electricity fer me until then. Also means no updates to this site until then either.

Have not made any posts latley but I'm still pluggin away at the new asp.net mvc site. It's comming along but again I am faced with a difficult decision on how I can store the character data effeciently as well as how to pre-calculate the character, guild and realm statistics. grrrr.

Anyway just posting to let u know i'm still on the job :D

On the new MVC version of the site I am working on I already had Ruby Sanctum stats setup but decided to add it for the current site as well.

I was also looking into uploading the new version of the site I'm working on as from what I'm reading I can compile it for .net 3.5 but the problem is that I am using features found in .net 4.0 such as the C# dynamic keyword as well as Tasks so the only way I could get the new site running would be to rewrite those pieces of code so they would be compatable with the .net 3.5 framework. But again the whole reason for using .net 4.0 is because the features allows me to write alot less code.

So that is something I'm going to have to think about.

Certified genius right here people teehee.

*takes big sigh of relief*

Finnally finished all the talent trees for each of the ten classes. I was doing it manually by hand editing the structure and values but stoped for a few days to think about doing it a better way. Had I continued it would have taken me weeks of painstaking editing and verifying.

So I did what any good engineer or programmer would do and build a system that did it for me :P It actually did not take as long as I thought it would to code. The little utility application that I used allowed me to define each talent tree layout, and max points per talent item, and icons etc.

I got the utility app working and all ten talent tree's done in a single day!

One thing I have been thinking about though is that wowtracks is aimed at being a statistics and character tracking website, so I have decided not to have any talent tree building functionality. If you want to playaround with talent trees I provide links on the talent pages to either the wowarmory talent builder or wowheads talent tree builder.

Dang it! I was just building the talent tree page for hunters when I just realized that I'm not capturing talent data for pets.  So hopefully this will be the last week that there will be missing pet talent data.

I've already started the armory crawl this week and it's 50% done already so hopefully by next weeks armory crawl pet talents will start being captured.

*Sigh* Well I setup a framework for displaying talent tree information. Here is a screenshot of the first warlock talent tree work in progress. Only 29 more talent trees to go  X.X  gah! This is gonna be a painstaking process QQ

Still working on the asp.net 4.0 mvc version of this site, and came across a bug. The bug has to do with how I was interpreting the equipped items that a character has, specifically the enchant that the item may have. It was recording the wrong enchant id, but now it's fixed.

Also got the basic framework complete for generating precalculated guild/realm/character data. This allows me to precalculate and store statistic data rather then doing it on the fly which is much slower because a number of statistics require that I look back into the previous weeks captured data set and compare it with the current data set for the week.

I know I keep talking about these fixes, and features, but have not added them to the site yet. I'm still waiting for my hosting provider to support asp.net 4.0. Once that hapends you will be able to see what I have been working on. But until then as I mentioned in a previous post, updates to this site as is will be minimal.

How much do I hate web development? This animated gif pretty much sums it up nicley.

Sigh* If it's not one thing it's another. The most simplest of things seem to turn into mega projects to get done. I've been coding the site anew in asp.net mvc. It is so clean, neat and relatively straight forwards to use. I like it a lot. But it is still new to me and there are annoying learning pains.

Some how my 26k+ list of character names is getting contaminated by a few random names that are gobblely gook. Names that should not be getting through the system and into the character list but they are. It does not affect the site in any way. Any attempt to grab armory data for the garbled character name from the armory naturally returns a no character found result, thus the character is not added to this site.

So there is still a lot of bug checking and validation needing to be done.   *Takes deep breath, pushes up sleeves, and continues with the torturous act of coding.

• Finally got site back up and running with everythng working right
• Uploaded this weeks armory data
• Enabled comments on blog posts. Now uses reCaptcha to deter spammers.

I may not be making much more updates to the site from now on, or rather not as frequently. I am in the process of learning asp.net mvc 2 and it is way cleaner and easier to work with. I am already well on my way to re tooling the site to run under asp.net mvc so the next few weeks there will not be to many updates til then.

I will continue to download armory data for SoE every week and upload it to the site so new data can be viewed. I am also near compleation of a distributed armory downloader. With this distributed downloader I can install it on any number of client machines and capture armory data faster. I have already put it to use it to capture data for May 25, 2010.

Frak I hate web development. All last week the site was down and it is still not fully back up and running. I also did not do a armory download for last week so that data is not going to be there. To make matters worse my personal website createdbyx.com is also down and I am still trying to get that back up and running.

So hopefully (with alot of luck) everything on both sites will be back up and running by the end of the week.