Social Media Icons

Small but important new feature! If you use Facebook, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Google Bookmarks, Digg or Reddit, please share our content via the new buttons on the right hand side! We are working on many new methods to spread the word and all of your help is most definitely appreciated.

EpicAdvice.com – Badge Widget

Here at EpicAdvice.com we are still coming up with the ways that we want to interact with our users and engage more users, in hopes of establishing EpicAdvice.com's Q&A system as a reputable source of information. We want the reputation you earn by asking and answering questions to mean something to you as well as to the community. We want bloggers and readers alike to contribute and team up with us to create a central repository of valid, helpful World of Warcraft information.

TLDR - In short, we want to promote your blog if you help promote our Q&A engine.

(Please note: We also are open to other ideas from YOU the bloggers. If you have a request, contact us at team@epicadvice.com and we will do everything in our power to accommodate your situation)

So our first major push to accomplish this is our new Badge Widget.

What is a badge widget?

The EpicAdvice.com Badge Widget is a small piece of javascript which will syndicate your choice of content, from EpicAdvice.com, into your blog or website. You can choose how many questions you want, based on what tags or based on your activity as a user, and customize the look at feel a little bit. All this widget does, is makes a request to our system for recent questions based on the tag or user ID you specified and return the number of questions you ask for. All aspects of the badge are customized through our simple interface. It's a very non-intrusive way to integrate new questions and activities from EpicAdvice.com into your website!

What are my different options for the widget?

There are quiet a few options now, with more on the way!

• Logo: Checking or Unchecking this checkbox will determine whether our logo is displayed at the top of the widget or just a chunk of text stating what the widget is.
• Content Choices - You can choose one of the following, using both currently is not available.
  • Tag: You can type a tag into this textbox, but only one (1) at the moment will work. So if you ran a druid blog and wanted to just display druid questions, simply type druid in the box. You could also put feral in the box for only feral druid questions. Be careful though, using holy will return Holy Priest and Holy Paladin questions. We are actively working on letting you pick more than one tag, so stay tuned.
  • User ID: If you want to make the widget follow what questions you are answering, commenting on or just involved in, all you need to do is type your User ID into this box. To find your username, simply click on your Username in the upper navigation bar, and you will be sent to your homepage. Your User ID is located in the URL bar on your web browser.
    • Example: For my user homepage, the link is: http://epicadvice.com/users/1/jesta (My User ID is #1).
    • Example: For gnarf's homepage, the link is: http://epicadvice.com/users/3/gnarf (Gnarf's User ID is #3).
  • User Show: This option is only used if you are going to specify your User ID. You have two choices:
    • Questions/Answers: This will show a list of questions and answers that you have posted.
    • Recent Comments/Edits/Responses: This is a little bit more involved and will show all of your edits, comments, responses as well as the questions and answers you provide. Probably a little too much information for most, but still useful.
  • # of Questions: This is simply the number of items you wish to display on your webpage. The default is 5, but you can configure it to show as many or few (even 0) as you would like. You can set the Questions to 0 and the Logo to enabled and it will just generate a small banner for EpicAdvice.com as well.

So how do I get a badge for my website?

Well, its extremely simple, we've setup an application that lets you pick what you want the badge to do for you, and it will generate the code you need to insert into your webpage. Simply visit http://profile.epicadvice.com/badge to generate one for your website! The code that the application generates on the right-hand side in the text box is all you need. You can change the options as much as you'd like to customize the feed for your website, then simply copy and paste the code from the box into your site, wherever you want to display it, and we will take care of the rest.

What am I going to get for putting this on MY blog/website?

Now we boil down to the good stuff, not only do you get to help syndicate our content, but we are integrating advertising for your blog onto our website. Our initial offering is going to be a 215x60 pixel banner on the right side, where the "ShareThis" and "Donate" buttons currently reside. We uploaded an example banner for EpicAdvice.com into that position currently so you can see for example what kind of space you have to work with. We also have dreamed up a few more goodies for people to participate in syndicating our content as well, we just are not ready to share them with everyone! So stay tuned for future updates on it.

We reserve the right to remove anyones banner at anytime and deny anyone access to our banner exchange, for any reason we deem valid.

How do I get a banner on your site for this?

Disclaimer - We will NOT post Banners or Advertising that link directly to any website that violates the Blizzard ToS for any of their games. No gold selling, no account selling/trading, no hack sites and no exceptions. You can still put our widget on your site if you want, but we will not return and put your banner up.

Right now we are doing it by hand, but this process may change in the future, we will keep you up to date. We are currently accepting 215x60 banners to put on the website. To submit your banner (after you've linked the widget on your website), send us the following information:

1. An Email Address you would like us to contact you at.
2. Your Website Name / Blog Name.
3. URL that you'd like the banner to go to.
4. URL of where you have your widget (if different).
5. Attach the actual image itself to the email.
6. Feel free to make an suggestions or what you'd like to see out of this in the future!

Put all of that in an email and send it off to team@epicadvice.com. That's it, we will get your image, and process them in the order we receive them. We promise we will get them all up.

So, I can just put this anywhere and you will put my banner up?

Well, not exactly. If you are trying to put a banner on a obscure page that no one will ever see, well we may weight your banner lower than someone who maybe, puts it on the front page. Hell, we may just delete it out of our rotation. We are trying to trade traffic with you, exposing our audience to you, and your audience to us. We are actively monitoring all of our web statistics and we reserve the right to remove your banner if you try to pull something shady.

What are the future plans for this?

Our future plans for this widget include displaying your Username on EpicAdvice.com, your Gravatar (or custom image), as well as your reputation. We also may do historical information, statistics, etc etc. There also could be more down the line, with whatever we may come up with next.

EpicAdvice.com LFM Bloggers? Authors?

Here at EpicAdvice.com, we are coming up with a ton of great new features to implement into our site daily. We do however want to hear what you would want on the site as well.

So far with the direction the site has steered, we've seen a lot of bloggers and active forum members actively engage in the Q&A process, which is definitely something we want to encourage. We would love to be the springboard of ideas for your blogging/discussion, or atleast contribute to your success. Now, the questions is, how do we make this happen?

Well we have been brainstorming a few ideas that I'd like to share and start your brains up, to see if maybe you could help us come up with a great idea. To start with, I am going to lay out some guidelines for the ideas, and what our goals behind this process are going to be.
Goals of the Features

1. The idea must be mutually beneficial for both parties; EpicAdvice.com and You!
2. Stimulate and produce content that would be interesting to our general public (ie WoW players).
3. Easy to Implement for the Blogger/Individual, we don't want to create more work for you to use our features.
4. Create Success for EpicAdvice.com AND your blog/website, this isn't all about us, our users make EpicAdvice.com possible.

Some of the ideas we have come up with, that we plan to implement, are as follows:

• Signature Generation based on your EpicAdvice.com Account (Show off your knowledge of WoW!)
• An External Widget people can put on their own website, showing off their reputation with EpicAdvice.
• Leaderboards for specific topics (almost a "sub-rep" system). Maybe the top 5 contributers to the "priest" tag would get a title?
• Advertising Trade, you advertise for EpicAdvice.com, we advertise for you!

Now, if you have a great idea, or something you believe we should do, I encourage you to comment on our blog or email us at team@epicadvice.com.We are actively seeking ideas on how we can work with other content providers to enrich their content as well as make the "reputation" on EpicAdvice a creditable source of information.

We appreciate everything you guys have done so far to make us a success!

And it begins!

Special thanks to WoW.com for publishing a short blip about us. You can view it here:

http://www.wow.com/2009/10/08/epicadvice-com-lets-you-ask-and-answer-warcraft-questions/

We are reading the comments and hopefully will be able to address some of the issues people are stating, but we definitely appreciate you guys stressing our servers for this beta period!

We also are going through and up-voting as much stuff as possible to give people enough rep to up-vote things as well. Its an archaic way to start the rep system, but you need to get a few people up enough to vote/etc before things will really get started!

We will try to keep you up to date on the blog, and expect a few more blips on the media radar over the next few days!