Firefox is tempting me

One of the reasons I gave for quitting WoW is that it took up too much of my time OUTSIDE of actually playing the game itself. This includes reading wowwiki, scouring thottbot for gear upgrades, the armory, the many MANY blogs that various people have, and a veritable plethora of random guild sites and strategy guides for various encounters.

Looking back through my bookmarks shows that a large portion of them are WoW-related. I'd say the number is close to half. Most of them are tips on playing classes I'm not used to, links to macros, or detail some minuscule nuance of the game that I wanted to reference later. All of these can be safely deleted, as there is no reason for me to know which type of tank is better for tanking encounter X or phase Y.

It's a lot harder to delete blogs off of my google reader. First and foremost, my google reader dynamically creates my blogroll on Laser Chicken. Even though I have no intention of continuing to post in Laser Chicken I would still like the content to remain the same for anyone who decides to visit it. I know when I was first getting into blogs and blogging it was nearly impossible for me to find the types of blogs I wanted to read about the class/spec I loved. This was the primary motivation for me to create a more organized (than most) blogroll on my site. When I found out how to create the blogroll directly from my google reader it was fantastic. I was able to find a blog I like, add it to my google reader, categorize it, and it would automatically show up on my blog roll. It was great for people who would sometimes switch, say from Balance to Resto, because I didn't have to change any html, just update their category. However, now that I'm finished with Laser Chicken, I do not wish to see those blogs in my google reader. This means that I have to convert my dynamically allocated blogroll to a static one, which requires a rather arduous task of coding up an html linked list. As with all projects that are large, I'm having a hard time starting it, so those blogs are all still sitting in my google reader.

In addition to the blogroll aspect of it, I'm having trouble deleting blogs out of my google reader because I like the authors. I like their writing style, I like to read what is going on in their lives, and I like to read the comments. This leads me to a big dilemma. Take Pike's most recent blog entry for example. I like reading Pike's material but if I keep her blog around I'll see stuff like this and think about my old days of alting it up. Now, I've been reading select blogs since I left (they are still in my google reader, I have no choice!) but up until this post none of the entries had given me pause to think about coming back. It's a slippery slope, if you see what I mean. Even once I make my blogroll static, I still have a tough choice to make about which blogs to keep and which to wave goodbye to forever.

Finally, I must and will stop checking the old guild forums. I spent two plus years with these people and I like them as individuals. If you cant tell though, I'm a little perturbed about their apparent lack of empathy for my departure. So I deleted my account from the site and won't be returning even though those forums are more often not about WoW than about it.