Spooncraft

So I got an email the other day from one of my readers who is having problems with the site. No complaints it’s not that kind of email, basically he views the site from work and for one reason or the other he cannot see the item links I put into my articles and posts.

I’ve seen this at other sites and wonder if it would be possible to do here. There are sites that have links that display the tooltips of items instead of item links that go to URLs. I generally read your site from work and there are blocks that prevent me from viewing the items on sites like WoWDB or WoWHead, or the like and to have them as tooltips would be awesome. If it is a pain, or too much of a bother, then no worries of course.

Thanks either way!

I do use WOWDB and Wowhead as my primary source for those tooltip links. I had a chat with a good friend of mine who just happens to be a genius at systems administrations and such so he pretty much knows what he’s doing with browsing the net from work. Basically there is no known way for me to realistically give item information/tooltips without using code that pulls the information from these sites. Here’s what he told me and thusly I relay to you.

Firewalls block traffic at IP and port levels - so depending on the source and coding it will block that stuff for both reasons. So no, there is no way to get that info without setting up a proxy. In other words, going out to some computer after the firewall that forwards the request for data back through the firewall through an established link. So far this makes no freaking sense to me but OK, moving on. You could try to set up a circumventor if you need to get content through to a blocked company - but yeah that would be a long and painful thing that would require updating. There are circumventor sites out there - but that goes back to how much you trust that site, because they could be malicious as well as beneficial. Most people refer to circumventors just as setting up a proxy.

So in a nutshell, if you got a buddy in the IT department of where you work, then you might be able to swing something, otherwise just stick to mobile browsing or check the site when you get home for a few moments. If there was anything I could do on my side I would, but as it stands if I had to type out the information and descriptions for every item I link, there would be maybe one post per day max.