Like playing a Hunter

It's funny how many real-world items have similarities to WoW. For instance, writing a blog is very much like playing a hunter. Hunters have a wide range of shots, stings & attacks at their disposal. The well-played hunter mixes up each of the shots to suit the exact needs. The well-written blog also mixes up the types of posts available to it, again to suit the exact situation. In both cases, spamming the same type of shot(post) over and over gets boring for everyone involved.

Let's look at the types of posts we have and the analogous hunter attack.

Misdirection: This can be one of the simplest posts of all. Find a good blog or website, post a link to that site (perhaps with some explanatory exposition) and hit publish. Your work here is done, effectively sending the masses off to another blog for their daily dosage. This shot is most often followed up by adding the blog to the blogroll.

Pet Attack: This is similar to misdirection. Find a good blog post. Where someone else has done all the work for you. Explain the linkage and link to the post. This can often be followed up with a post of your own either agreeing or dissenting with the original post. The difference between this and a misdirection is you're highlighting a particular post with pet attack, while a misdirect is just a good general blog.

Arcane Shot: Quick post. This is probably a quickly written post, containing mostly opinion or very trivial facts. There isn't a lot of writing or research time. Not a lot of thinking is required by the blogger for this type of post. Sometimes marked with the "rant" tag.

Stings: These are posts that give information over time. Taken together these can be quite long posts that require a lot of thinking and research. However, since they are presented over time, it is less work to both read and write on a particular day. Nearly all multi-part posts fit into this category.

Steady Shot: Medium effort posts both in terms of writing and research. In game Steady Shot has a 1.5 second cast time, thus there's a fair bit of commitment to this type of post. However, research shouldn't be excessively long and it should be fairly easy to spam this type of post. May even be re-packaging or collecting information presented elsewhere in a simpler format.

Aimed Shot: Here it is. The big mother. This post can take a very long time to research. The information is likely scattered in several places and must be painstakingly collected, collated, spindled, folded and mutilated by the poster. Even then the long time may require the poster to begin work days before the readership even knows its coming. Is sometimes broken up into several shorter posts, at which point it becomes a sting.

What post types are left off? Clearly the various hunter traps, but I don't like to write posts that execute malware scripts and highjack the reader's browser (freezing trap) and I'm not sure the various widgets that track hits and traffic on the site (track humanoid) are really blog post types.