How to persist data between sessions in your World of Warcraft Addon

After fiddling around with trying to save data between game sessions, I've laid out a few lines of code that could easily used in any sample addon you ever decide to develop. Assuming that you've already setup your hello world addon, you can simply add these lines to to your OnInitialize callback to create a new data store.

Now if you want to save data to it (or insert a row), do the following

If you want to read off of the data store, do the following

The reason why I put 'global' is because global signifies storing data for all characters between the account. As the developer, you have a choice of scoping:

'profile'
'char'
'realm'
'race'
'faction'
'class'
'factionrealm'
'global'
'profiles'

Since the addon I'm developing stores data across all characters I set mine up for global data collection.

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TextMate Tutorial: How to add a Strikethrough keybind to your Markdown bundle

Markdown is awesome for quickly generating Readme's on Github. After looking at other projects using the strike tag, I've decided to create a custom keybind for it in my TextMate Markdown bundle. Here's how:

1) Click the + sign on the bottom left and click New Command.
2) Paste this into the editbox and make sure you name your command "Strikethrough".

For the input field, select WORD in the drop down.
For the output field, select "insert as snippet".
As for the keybind, you can totally map it to whatever you're comfortable with but I chose Command-D as it is the same thing in Microsoft Word.

Cheers,
Jaime

World of Warcraft Ninjalist addon: version 0.1 coming along quite nicely

After toying around with more GUI related issues in World of Warcraft's API, I've decided to take a totally different direction. Originally when I architected this addon, I knew in my mind it would be a super simple Console application that a user could easily paste in a name and add it to the database; however, why stop there?

After discovering AceGUI, I can easily start developing UI components in no time! As of right now, I've got it saving data in between game sessions--the interesting part will come when I'll have to develop the web service that will parse the SavedVariable.lua, eliminate duplicate entries, as well as, do a huge merge between their copy and whats on the server's (per realm basis of course).

Here's a screen shot of the responses when adding new Ninjas to your list:
When a user clicks add after entering a name in the textbox, it'll go ahead and add that person to the ninjalist tagging the user's realm and current date/time. Someday, I…

Plenty of Fish - Lessons Learned Meetup

Today, I had the fantastic opportunity of going to a retrospective by Plenty of Fish. As you may know, Plenty of Fish is the largest online dating site and it was all started by a local BCIT graduate named Markus Frind.

Below are notes that were taken on my iPhone. I do apologize as I am continually editing this blogpost.

What is Plenty of Fish? An online dating site.
Why enter the dating market? Back in 2003, it was the only thing that was interesting to build. Markus already knew ASP but wanted to learn more about building web applications with ASP.NET and improve his skills on his resume.
How do you deal with the network effects problem? In the early days, Plenty of Fish gained traction through Vancouver and Toronto. There wasn't any silver bullet or magic around it -- Plenty of Fish heavily relied on organic user growth and SEO. The focus was to retain users more than go out and acquire new ones.
What are some early challenges you faced? Markus actually ended up doing every…

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