Review: Power World Gold

First in the series of gold blog reviews.


I want to support my gold-blogging community by reviewing the best of the World of Warcraft gold blogs, and hopefully throwing some more traffic their way.  If you’ve been looking for more free resources for learning how to make gold in World of Warcraft, this is the perfect place to start.

Power Word: Quality

Basics


Power Word: Gold is run by Fluxdada. He describes his blog as “Celebrating the Art of Gold Making in World of Warcraft.”


It’s hard to believe that PW:G, as we affectionately call it, only started on February 7th this year. The reason I’m including it in my list of blog reviews, as the first even, is that Fluxdada specialises in quality content, rather than quantity.  He’s not shy to post about a subject if other blogs have already covered it, but only if he has a good point that other blogs have missed, or an interesting idea that are actually of importance to gold makers.




Quality of content


In other words, PW:G writes what is known by bloggers as “Epic Blogs”.  They’re important, they’re the best top quality, no fluff or filler.   Sure, you won’t get a post every day, but do you really want to be overwhelmed by crap anyway?  Fluxdada has a hell of a lot of self-confidence in order to hold back from pandering to the masses. His stuff is good.  You can quote me on that.  10/10

Design / theme / accessibility


Poor PW:G is stuck using Blogger, but look how well he squeezes the design out of it.  Relaxing use of white space, and no over-whelming flashing lights and fireworks.  It does what it says on the tin. The colors, hm, not for me, however you can’t help that gold is colored, well, gold. Hence the golden background.

What I do appreciate is the writing style.  Informative headings, and short, readable paragraphs.  Fluxdada got this right from the start. Unlike me.  You’re going to go surfing back to my firsts posts now and lol at them aren’t you? *sob*  PW:G has a personal touch, but he cuts straight to the point and delivers the content without messing around.

PW:G also uses a cut tag in his posts, that’s a “read more” link.  The first page can therefore hold a lot more than just the latest blog post, without readers getting RSI from scrolling to the bottom.

I would like to see a “Most Popular Posts” widget included in the side bar, I think it would help new readers to discover which posts are the most well read, which is easier than surfing through the tag cloud. Not sure if this can be achieved though without cluttering up the white space.

Usefulness of content

As a guide for the overall blog usefulness, let’s take an example, chosen almost randomly from a month of nicely written posts. http://powerwordgold.blogspot.com/2011/02/my-whiptail-runneth-over.html goes further than the other whiptail blog posts “omg whiptail everywhere1111” and starts to analyse possible uses for whiptail, and walks the reader through studying the Auction House, and roughing out the maths to find the best possible uses.  Not only does this give the solution to the question posed by the reader, what to do with all the whiptail, but it also teaches how to respond to similar situations, and how to use the tools available to arrive at a decision.

Regular updates


You’re not going to get Pure Gold Quality like this every day, it seems Fluxdada has a day job as well, so readers are kept on their toes waiting for content.  I wonder if in the future, PW:G will evolve to a blog that’s published on a regular date once a week or so, so readers can get ready and build trust about when the next post will arrive.  Fluxdada’s biggest worry is maintaining the motivation to keep posting regularly, and having a once-twice a week regular schedule might help encourage him.

I’m sure he’d appreciate if you have any feedback on this idea, readers?

Bad points

PW:G may step in and contradict me here, but I have a feeling that the ‘donate’ button at the top of the page isn’t going to work. Apart from us all being horribly poor i.r.l. donating to blogs isn’t a standard expectation of the casual browser.  Maybe Flux could try a “buy me a coffee” button like I use, although I confess that none of my readers have yet found any of my posts worthy of a Starbucks Latte.

Best  Post

http://powerwordgold.blogspot.com/2011/02/converting-large-negative-copper-values.html


This starts off feeling like a follow up post to my “The Shocking Reason …” post, except PW:G goes on to  provide a really useful tool and answer a question I’ve never seen before.  “one of my toons had a rather strange number floating around in her Statistics > Character > Wealth screen … -2014179932 copper. “


He then goes on to detail exactly how he discovered the answer to the problem, and further, he made a tool that can answer this question for everyone else who has ever wondered “wtf? did I break WoW?”

To that end I’ve created Flux’s WoW Negative Copper To Actual Gold Converter. A page where you can convert your large negative copper values into actual gold values with the press of a button.

Special Mentions
The very top of PW:G says

Report MMO Gold Selling AdsPower Word: Gold does not condone the sale of in-game gold, items, levels etc. for real-world money. Please report offending ads to powerwordgold@gmail.com“

Gold sellers beware. Try and reply to his comments or use the site to advertise your naughty wares, and he’ll kick you in the nuts.

Last words:

YES Its going on my blogroll now.

About the Author

The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 10 garrisons, 16k achievements, 1505 days played, and over 18m gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making.