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

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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

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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
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Using Yeoman, Jenkins in Continuous Integration

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Yeoman is a tool that will concatenate and minify your scripts, as well as, run JavaScript unit tests (JasmineBDD) inside a PhantomJS instance. It's fast and easy to integrate into your existing continuous integration process. At present, we have Jenkins as our work horse who will do the following upon each push to a specific development branch:
Concatenate all JavaScripts based on a Gruntfile (GruntJS with NodeJS)Run JSHint on the concatenated JavaScript file (call this all.js)Minify the generated concatenated JS file (call this all.min.js)Run "yeoman test" to execute all the JavaScript specs against the concatenated JavaScript fileThis should fail the build process if any specs fail or if JSHint chokes At this point, you could ship the assets over to CDN on Amazon CloudFront or Windows Azure Blob (CDN) to further reduce latency for your users.
Below is a shell script that can be easily modified to fit your needs:
yeoman concat min --disable-insight --no-color rm -r…
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Plenty of Fish - Lessons Learned Meetup

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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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