Main Website

Well, I guess the biggest change was adding a Contact Form to my website for sending me email. Before, I used a bit of JavaScript to construct my email link. In an effort to keep the search bots from seeing it, I’m not including a direct link to it here. In fact, if my site detects that a search bot of some kind is viewing it, it doesn’t display the link. I’ve also added my “I am a human” verification, like I’ve done with my guestbook, to it. In the process of creating and testing this form, I’ve improved some of the behind-the-scenes stuff, mostly to do with debugging. In a weird twist, I had to rewrite and debug some of my debugging aides.

Mysstie’s EverQuest Website

Well, even though it only affects me and what I can do, I’ll go ahead and talk about it. While doing the Nights of the Dead 2013 quests in EverQuest II, I was always wondering if I had already gotten a particular house item reward. You can’t search for the item in game if it’s been placed in a house somewhere or is sitting in some moving crate or is being stored in a salesman’s crate of some kind on the broker.

At the same time, I had purchased the Fright Manor and wanted to create some walls and ceilings for the basement. This got me to learning how to use the Layout Editor which uses the house layout files. I then had a “light-bulb” moment and realized I could write my own PHP scripts and MySQL database to upload and parse these files and add the items into my database which I could then load up Mysstie’s site and search using the game’s browser or my preferred browser while out of game.

After a fair amount of coding work and the transferring of hundreds of house items from broker and house vault storage to house moving crates, I’ve completed that task. Unless I missed something, I’ve got 3,282 house items spread across my toon’s 14 houses:

In the tables that show the actual items, I include links to an item’s description and image at EQ2 Furniture so I know where it came from and what it looks like. I use their search feature and just substitute the item’s name in the URL. Since this stuff really only benefits me, I’m the only one that can see and use it. Anyway, I just think it’s all kinds of cool and rather handy to have now. 🙂

That’s all I can think of for now. 🙂 Hmm, two posts in one day.. that’s got to be a record LOL.