Tag Updates

Extra! Extra! New Post! – Zynga Mafia Wars – How to win a fight, best weapons, armor and vehicles

So, by now some of you may have noticed some cool new features, enhanced gifting, asking mafia members for help, etc.   So here are some of those items broken down a bit!

Helping your family out! This is a cool feature.  From what I can tell – you publish your need to help complete a job, and all they need to do is click on it and wondrous things can happen, both for you and the person clicking on it!

It doesn’t require you to use up any of your energy or anything, you just earn experience and money for clicking on something, effectively helping out your community!

That said, there is a lot of value to be derived both for you in completing the job, the mafia member you’re helping, and Zynga from a viral spread into the community perspective, so a tip of the hat to them for introducing this :)

In the realm of Gifting, I’m sure we’ve all seen this lovely new icon:

Yes, it is the little package, and yes I have a lot of horses :) Though that said, I’ll publish a list of what outstanding items I have that I’m glad to give away if anyone is in need :)

Also, here is a breakdown of the Loot and the bonus you get from them

If you happen to have pictures of the missing bonuses (and the missing bonuses) let me know!  Or if I’m missing anything in general :)

	Collection	Bonus
	Diamond Flush Collection	+1 energy
	Heart Flush Collection	???
	Sculptures Collection	+3 defense
	Poker Chips Collection
	Club Flush Collection	???
	Cigars Collection
	Spade Flush Collection	+2 stamina
	Rings Collection
	Ties Collection	+6 defense
	Paintings Collection
	Cufflinks Collection
	Great Race Horse Collection

And what is the greatest addition to gifting? You can now gift items you win from doing jobs! Items such as Blackmail Photos, Computer Set-Up’s, and the ever elusive Untraceable Cellphone (A day doesn’t go by where I don’t get a request for those, as I use them all up myself too :))

If you’re looking for other information on Mafia wars, check out my other post :)

And as always, feel free to add me on Facebook, Mafia Wars, and on Twitter :)

Extra! Extra! New Post! – Zynga Mafia Wars – How to win a fight, best weapons, armor and vehicles

I was talking with a friend of mine tonight asking him what he used to do his blog writing, and he said he used the WordPress editor.  I was shocked, awed, even amazed.

He is a perfect candidate for using LiveWriter, if not for the simple reason that you can put words NEXT to text without having to do all forms of magic to get it done.

There is however one amazing feature of LiveWriter which not enough people realize.

If you go into the Help, you’ll find the Writer Team Blog!

That simple little action lead me to find (because I wondered if there was an update) That indeed there is an update! The RC for LiveWriter 2009 is out! I didn’t even know it was coming!

What’s new in 2009?

Well, you can go to the Writer Blog and find out more like here or here.

But I’ll cover a few of the things which I find particularly amazing and I think you’ll agree!

Oh my god! Word Count! What a simple yet elegant function! And here it is!

(These number of words are ofcourse, up until this point!)

That’s also Sweet! (found in options!)

Some of the new plug-ins seem pretty sweet!

FLICKR UPLOAD
Uploads an image to your Flickr account and inserts an inline picture into your post.

DIGG THIS
Automatically adds a DiggThis badge to your blog post after you publish it from Writer.

TWITTER NOTIFY
Automatically generates a TinyURL and sends a Tweet about your blog post after you publish it from Writer.

Speaking of images! (Like that one above) Your image manipulation options have gone through the roof!

Check out our ability to do text wrapping! Though a major pet peeve of mine is when I click “next” to an image after selecting Left, it keeps bringing me to the top! (hint hint) It’d really be nice for it to select the area next to the text so I can start typing there!

With the introduction of Center, it guarantees our place with the position of the text after an image.  It’d be nice to have some kind of universal everything I post should default to ‘x’ though I’ve yet to find these defaults/options to manage.

Check out those borders baby! Wow that is a lot of options to choose from and I’m not complaining!

Infact, I opt’d to give “reflection” a try here, looks pretty sweet!

But nothing can really compete with… a Watermark embedded into your image?!

You can manipulate the text, the font type and size, and especially the position.  Seriously, Wow, this is cool!

Let me say this again.  This is really cool!

Oh, did I mention how fricking cool TILT is?!

Some of the new Photo Album and other settings will be pretty sweet, but managing text, writing it, manipulating images and getting content into some usable fashion are my major deals with this as are a majority of folks I know who use LiveWriter.  Everything else is just CAKE!   I suggest you go out there and download this RC now! Get it out there, because is this pretty sweet, and will continue to be sweet!

Windows Live Writer 2009 (Release Candidate)
Version 14.0.8050.1202

Go, get your Live on!

Today, Twitter offered an explanation of the Deletions issues a number of Twitter users have been experiencing: Updates on deletions

Status deletion has been re-enabled.

User restoration has also been re-enabled.

User deletion remains off as it still represents a significant problem for the stability of the service. In the past several months, we’ve had to turn off user deletion many times in order to keep things running smoothly. Each time we turned it back on, we’d hoped we had sufficiently patched the existing system to prevent it from being a problem.

We’ve now concluded that the user deletion system needs to be rewritten and we’ve started that effort. Until we finish, user deletion will remain off. There’s a number of places throughout the site where we will need to message this better. We’ll be making those changes as well.

Certainly, this is a concerning issue, only one of which plagues the frequent twitter users in the tweetosphere.   Without any knowledge of exactly how they’re handling the routines for handling user deletion, aging, and load experienced on the system I could only offer the briefest of a question of how it is being addressed with suggestions.

We’ll see if the Tweetosphere continues to suffer from Performance issues such as this, and the frequent Site Outages experienced throughout the week.  Always raising the question and concern of have they properly accounted for the scale of this volume and the user communities peaks and valleys for system load.

I’ll keep my eye on it, but here is your word from the Twitter itself! @cxi – Christopher Kusek