Buff'd Blog

Hey everybody,

We’re starting to see very good submission to our feedback page. We really do appreciate you taking the time to give us some excellent feedback.

We wanted to let you know that we are working on these suggestions and will make many of them a reality real soon. If you haven’t seen our feedback page, you can always find it using the red Feedback button on the left side of your screen when you’re on our site pages.

All the best,

Your friends at Buff’d

We’ve released patch 1.01. It brings the ability to invite friends to join Buff’d, submit videos, added video and podcast categories and Buff’d tools.

Buff’d tools are things to make Buff’d easier to submit to. Bloggers can now place a smart “Buff it!” button right on their blog posts. This will allow their readers to buff their stories right from their blog! The button will show that actual number of buffs the story has received.

Bloggers will also be able to add smaller share it buttons at the end of their posts. A Feedburner feedflare is also available.

Folks,

Thanks for hanging with us as we continue to roll out site developments. We are now trucking along on version 1.0.  As you can see, we have a new look and have added two small but useful features- Retweet and subscribe to comments.

You will now see a Tweet button on the bottom of every Tell.  If you use Twitter and want to alert your followers about the Tell, simply click on that button to submit a Tweet. You will be taken to the Twitter submit page and the Tweet will be auto-populated. Of course, you can modify it as you like.

Also, you will now have the ability to subscribe to a Tell’s comments by simply checking the box when you submit a comment.  You will be alerted by email when a response to your comment is submitted.

Lastly, but probably most evident, is our new site design.  Like everything else on the site, we will continue to fiddle with it, hopefully, for the better.  We think the new color scheme is going in the right direction and certainly an improvement from our original “drab” look.  

We have received plenty of comments from members who want us to use more “WoW graphics and images.”  We want to say, “We hear you!”  We will work on it.  We ask for your patience because our website design is a compromise between site speed and looks.  After all, you come to Buff’d to get the news fast, right?  You’d be disappointed with a site that had a ton of WoW graphics but was too slow. And, of course, those always those legal issues with using graphics that belong to or are too close to Blizzard-owned IP. 

Stay tuned for patch 1.01 for more features.  We anticipate this patch will drop within a couple of weeks.  In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to let our Chief Evangelist know if there’s anything we can do better! You can reach him at webmaster@buffd.net. 

Best regards,

Your friends at Buff’d

Hi there,

Have you noticed that link at the bottom of the submit page that says something about “trackbacks”? You haven’t?! Well, it’s very important. LOL Let me tell you why.

Trackbacks are the reasons blogs have become what they are today. They are the way a blogger sees who is linking to his story. In essence, it’s a link that says “Hey, your awesome post has just been submitted to Buff’d!” 

Unfortunately, some blogging platforms (e.g., Blogger) don’t allow for trackbacks and some bloggers haven’t properly set their software up to receive them.  This is where this link at the bottom of the submit page comes in.

I would encourage (you don’t have to but the owner of the story you are submitting would appreciate it) you to click on that link when you submit a story and make sure that there is a trackback URL there.  Sometimes our software can automagically detect it.  If we can’t, you can add it manually. Here’s how:

1. If you see the word “blogspot.com” in the URL you are submitting, then the blog is hosted on Blogger. The only thing you can do (if you’re really, really nice) is suggest that the blog owner subscribe to www.haloscan.com so that he can start receiving trackbacks.
2. If you don’t see blogspot in the URL and the URL is only words (e.g.,  http://www.domain.com/2009/04/04/the-article-name/), then all you need to do is copy the URL into the trackback box and add “trackback/” without the quotations. You’re done and more karma to ya!
3. If you don’t see the above but instead you see a URL that looks like this: http://www.mysite.com/?p=127, all you need to do is add “wp-trackback.php” right before the question mark, of course, without the quotations.  This earns you double karma points!
4. Lastly, you may find that the story page you are linking has a “permalink URL or trackback URL”.  In that case, simply copy and paste that URL into the trackback box and continue on your merry way.

If you take the time to be a good and helpful citizen of the Internet, the site owners who write the stories you submit to Buff’d will love you tremendously.  Good things will come your way including, possibly, a magical dev gear item that will let you one-shot Ulduar bosses. Maybe.

All the best

As players start to become aware of our service, the question becomes how to incorporate Buff’d into your daily routine.  Here’s what’s working for us.

1. Grab the RSS feed!  This makes staying up to date on what’s happening on Buff’d real easy.  You can grab the Published Tells feed, the Upcoming Tells feed or even a feed for a category or a user.
2. When you get up in the morning, pour yourself a cup of joe (coffee) and either scan the RSS feed or the Buff’d frontpage.  You should be up to date on most important news from the last 24 hours and Buff the ones you like.  If you have a little more time, scan for the Upcoming Tells page and Buff those you really think are important for others to read.  Of course, any Spam that got through our security system NEEDS A NERF so pwn it a nerf vote.
3. When you’re bored at work and start surfing the net for WoW info, be sure to hit your Add to Buff’d! bookmarklet to quickly submit it t Buff’d.  It’s good karma and I can almost guarantee that you will one-shot your next raid boss as a result (maybe).
4. If you have a blog or knows someone who does, please be sure to submit your posts or ask the blog author to do so.  The more people submitting the better Buff’d will be.

As always, any thoughts, questions, comments, complaints are always appreciated!  Please send them to our Chief Evangelist (webmaster@buffd.net).

All the best

It’s great to see that people are curious about Buff’d. As we speak with more and more people, we constantly get asked the question, “What is Buff’d about and why should I care?”  That’s an awesome question and we’d like to share with you why we decided to put Buff’d together and bring it to WoW players.

The World of Warcraft is a global phenomenon. Yes, we know it’s a massively popular online game, but that’s not the only thing we mean.  We know it was ahead of its time and extremely well done.  We know the lore is cool and has a huge following.  But, that and more can be said about other MMOs recently too, perhaps, even more so (e.g., Lord of the Rings, Warhammer).  So what’s so unique about WoW that has resulted in it being the king of MMOs for almost five years now?  In our humble opinion, it’s the WoW community of players and how the game facilitates social interaction.

This thriving global community of players has taken on a life of its own and generates WoW-related information at a pace and at a level that Blizzard could never accomplish by itself.  It simply would be impossible to bottle and sell the genius of Elitist Jerks, popularity of WoW.com, or the show mastery of podcasts like Inside Azeroth and The Instance.  Information is the life blood of this growing community and it is generated by players for players. It then becomes each player’s responsibility to figure out how to find and digest that information, separating the noise from the real gems (those diamonds in the rough).  Just like our online fishing experience, you cast your attention at the news sources you know and hope you catch something valuable.

This is where Buff’d comes in.  We want to facilitate the finding and digesting of WoW-related information.  It doesn’t matter if the information comes from the most popular WoW site or the most obscure blog, we want that information to find its way to our site where it will be judged by the player community on its merits.  If the story is good, the Buff’d community will vote for it by “Buffing it.”  If they find it lacking, they will vote it down by “Nerfing it.” The stories with enough “buffs” will make it to the homepage where it will be available for all to see and read.  This way, by scanning our homepage, you should be reading that day’s best WoW-related stories as found and voted on by your fellow WoW-players.

So, Buff’d is about finding WoW info easy for everyone.  But to do that, we need every player to take on a simple responsibility of giving back to the community.  All you do is place an “Add to Buff’d!” bookmarklet on your browser toolbar.  As you go about your day surfing for WoW info, if you find something good, hit that bookmarklet!  It will autopopulate that story into our submit page.  A few clicks later, you’ve submitted the story and helped the whole WoW community learn about your find.  This is giving back. No addons tracking you or big brother cookies. We simply rely on your willingness to give back to your fellow players and they will give back to you.

This is why Buff’d is here and that is why you should care.

All the best,

Your friends at Buff’d

Being the new kid on the block is never easy.  We know how busy people are and that getting involved with another site may seem like chore… So, we’d like to sweeten the deal a little.

We figure that if you’ll spend hours grinding Argent Tournament dailies for rep, you may consider giving our site a try and not only give back to the World of Warcraft community (karma points!) but also get a chance to win some pretty epic loot.  Here’s what you can win:

• Top submitter after on August 1 wins $100;
• Second place submitter on August 1 wins $50;
• Person with the most votes on August 1 wins $75; and
• We will be raffling off $25 Jinx gift certificates randomly between now and August 1.

So, come on. Join the fun, it’s easy.

All the best,

Your friends at Buff’d

Any decent online enterprise has to have a blog so here is ours!

Here we will tell you what’s going on with the site, any issues we encounter and, hopefully, give you any information you feel you need to know about us.

Thanks for taking the time to look through our site and PLEASE feel free to send us your comments.  You can always communicate with us by sending an email to webmaster@buffd.net.  We promise to respond to each and every one of your emails.  Yes, you are that important to us!

All the best,

The Buff’d team