EpicAdvice.com – The Blog! No sir, thats Mr. Coffee. This is the blog…

Been a while, eh?

It's been quite a while since we've visited and blogged about EpicAdvice, I wanted to take a moment to bring everyone up to speed again.

EpicAdvice.com has been neglected for a while now, lack of promotions, updates, moderation and more importantly, lack of communication. We apologize for the that, but it's been a long hard road re-designing the site from the ground up, and re-thinking every facet of its development. I'm happy to say we've hit some groundbreaking milestones in the past few months that are going to allow us to move forward, with the community, instead of us sitting back in the shadows developing new code.

Onto what's new, what we're doing, the future ideas and what we need!

Whats New?

Obviously, there's a lot new coming into EpicAdvice as we roll out our new features. Here's a quick list of the new stuff we've pushed live:

• New Engine - We're powered on our own tech, which we've dubbed EpicDb for the time being. EpicDb is built upon the Zend Framework using PHP 5.3. Our entire storage engine is now also powered by MongoDB. We're storing images in the AWS cloud and are making use of a lot of new and advanced technologies to help speed up the site and bring features to life.
• Following Tags - As a user of EpicAdvice.com, you can now follow/unfollow or block/unblock anything in our database. Have a friend on EpicAdvice? Visit their profile and follow them. Play a warrior and have a mage alt? Visit the warrior tag and the mage tag and follow them! You like enchanting? Feel free to follow the enchanting tag! You can also re-visit them and un-follow the tag if you feel it's not your cup of tea. You can search for any topic in the search bar at the top of the page.
• Blocking Tags - Do you absolutely not care about something or someone? Do you not want to see anything of theirs on your dashboard(read below)? You now have the option to block anything on the website. However, let me warn you, blocking currently is only implemented on the dashboard, and blocking always wins. If you are following someone that posts something about a topic you've blocked, you won't see their post. Blocking is the last resort option for "I don't want to see anything about this"... (ie. during the cataclysm beta test, if you didn't want to see any spoilers, you could of blocked the 'cataclysm' tag to hide everything cataclysm related).
• The "Dashboard" - Got a better name? Let us know Currently the dashboard is a place you can go to find news, questions, and discussion based on the tags you are following (read above). We are designing it to be very much like a twitter feed or an RSS feed. It's a place that you can visit to find all the up-to-date activity that is occurring on EpicAdvice.com and all over the web!
• New Login Options - Along with all the traditional login methods we've supported in the past (OpenID), we now are pleased to announce that you can login with your facebook/twitter accounts as well! Currently, the only thing that happens when you log in with one of those ID's is it identifies who you are, and creates a profile for you. We don't do any of that automatic tweeting stuff or try to publish anything to your facebook wall. If we did, we'd ask, but we don't!
• Tag Wiki's - Currently, only admins can edit them, but every tag on the site has a "wiki" page associated to it so we can describe what that tag is about. If you'd like to actively be involved in the editing and creation of wiki pages, let us know

What we're Doing?

Our feature list is like 3 miles long right now, but here's a sneak peak at what our immediate development ideas are:

• First and foremost, we will be doing bug fixes to what currently is active.
• Adding interactive tooltips to every tag on the website, that will allow you to easily find information, follow or block a tag on the fly.
• Expanding "Profiles" into a more socially-oriented area, we want you to be able to send each other messages, ask each other questions and form groups with people you associate with.
• Expanding our "tags" into more robust records, including general information and media about that tag.

Future Ideas...

• Achievements / Badges aren't in the system anymore. Reputation is, but the existing badges are on hold. We have historic records of all the badges you've all earned, but we still need to expand upon the achievement system we have in place. It wasn't ready, so we didn't include it.
• Guild Profiles - Want to participate on EA as a guild? We will have some cool integrations for guilds to work together to ask and answer questions!

What we need!

We're a 2 man team, we've done a lot ourselves, but we may need a hand

• A Designer - We've never claimed to be designers, I believe we said that like during the first week or two of the original EpicAdvice launch. But we do want a designer that we can work with. You can see our sites pretty plain now, with some boxes, shadows and very little color. That's where we need someone to come in with their magical box of crayons! We need someone that knows HTML/CSS inside and out, loves WoW, is good with Photoshop to work with us. We can't offer you any pay, but we may have some perks lined up in the future for you and will work with you on whatever you demands are.

I'm sure I missed a few things, actually I probably missed a lot. This was a total re-write, my brain hurts about trying to think of the differences between the two sites. It's apples and oranges now, and we hope you like oranges. Feel free to sound off in the comments, or as always, you can email us at team@epicadvice.com.

Thanks everyone!