Late Night Fiction

Today I went ahead and contacted Kongregate about my work being stolen and how I’d like it removed. It didn’t take more than 20 minutes for me to get a response telling me my work had been removed. Now that is what I call service.

I ended up celebrating by adding The BUTTONS to Kongregate, finally under my own name. After a few adjustments I got it completely working. I might update it soon to integrate the Kongregate API, it sounds pretty interesting. But everything is good now, because what’s mine is mine again.

Internet, Projects development, Flash

And so it is done– the new self-hosted Late Night Fiction! It was a bit more of a pain than simply exporting and importing; I had to save each image that I’ve posted (luckily there weren’t many) and then upload them all to the server (since I didn’t have access to my files). Also, users got erased, as I didn’t have access to my database either since this was previously a “1&1 Blog” installation.

Otherwise, we made it unscathed and I’m in the process of adding tags to all the posts and adding the cool widgets and such. It looks like the tags will be phasing out a few categories as well.

Internet blogging, development

FlashStuf has become more and more difficult to maintain with the same methods I’ve been using all these years. All the coding, updates, and news (to name a few) is done manually, by me typing it all in. Now I’ve been spending all of my free time in the last few months on a complete site package that’ll allow anyone to maintain a full-blown website. What it does is gives you a pretty text editor to edit your files with, and the rest is taken care of. On the other hand, when I want to add a new animation on FlashStuf, for example, I have go through an unnecessary amount of manually-editing steps:

I start by creating the movie/game viewing page, using a program I created in Flash to generate the code. I then move on to a PHP script I created to generate a commenting-, relative-date- enabled news entry, and open my home page file and paste that in under the news section. I copy and paste in a new line item under the Newest Content section, subbing in the title, artist, and page info. I then have to update the full list of all the site flash content (the games or movies page), and right now if it’s a big artist’s work, I add a link to their page as well. Oh, and did I mention the RSS feed?

What I’m getting at here is the beauty of automation, especially when tailored to the needs of a specific site. When I created FlashStuf over 4 years ago, I had not planned for the extensive collection of content it would eventually become– manually updating the site on a regular basis was completely doable. But now that it has grown, there needs to be a more efficient way to maintain it if I want to keep all our loyal visitors. So, once I’m done with my biggest time-consumer of a website package, I’ll be re-designing FlashStuf, inside and out.

However, with all these changes, there’s just one thing that I’m stuck on and that will never change about FlashStuf– it’ll never become a portal-like website, such as Newgrounds. As great as it is to submit your work and have it on the internet instantly, I think a lot can be said about how difficult it can be to find flash content that instead seems to come and go like a fad. The biggest thing I want for FlashStuf is to have a great collection of content that will always have a home here, and always be easily available to anyone, even those not trying to stumble upon it.

Internet development, FlashStuf

I was going through my site today when I realized all the flash pages didn’t show in Internet Explorer. I instantly knew what it was. Only because a week ago I was working on another site that wouldn’t display a simple ad I created. Every time I had looked at my site I just figured it was Flash running slow. Turns out when I use the object tag, for the movie parameter you gotta specify the path as well as in the embed part. Luckily I had gone through that little run on the other site I was doing a week ago because I knew the problem instantly.

Thing is, the hits on FlashStuf have been steadily decreasing since right around the very beginning of January, when they were their highest. They were just falling for no apparent reason. When looking at my code of where the pages started going wrong, the very first incompatibly-coded page was  made December 26. It all made sense.

This just shows how regular, constant testing is always necessary (though I’m usually pretty good about this). Especially when it’s dealing with my site’s main content. I must’ve lost tons of visitors because they figure most of the games and movies and stuff they came for isn’t even showing up. Granted it was 63 pages that needed the change, but that’s a huge deal considering my 150ish flash pages. Luckily I can attribute the hits-drop to that and some other reason I have no idea of. Basically, this has taught me a lesson. And I’m working on tons of other features for the site now that I know nothing big is broken (I won’t be wasting my time).

Projects development, FlashStuf