SiteStart

Max Damage

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:32:00 +0000

Max Damage is the latest and greatest irRegularGame just released. It is based on the excellent Box2D physics engine and involves shooting cannonballs at stacks of targets like tv's, fridges, boxes and artwork. Plenty of fun and puzzling to be had with bouncy, explosive and flaming cannonballs all part of the mix. Why are you still reading this?

Oh and this is my first game using the shiny new MochiCoins microtransaction system, will be very interesting to see how it goes!

Sproing Reloaded

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 05:37:00 +0000

Sproing Reloaded is the sequel to my first irRegularGame (Sproing). It's had a number of improvements including: graphics overhaul, new upgrades and awards systems, 30 brand spanking new levels, unlockable game mode, and red-green colorblind players are no longer disadvantaged!

Check it out!

The irRegularGame of Life

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 23:06:00 +0000

The irRegularGame of Life is an unusual puzzle game based on Conway's famous "Game of Life". The patterns that evolve are fascinating to watch. Try to puzzle your way through the 42 levels or simply mess around in the Sandbox!

Adventure Ho!

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 01:48:00 +0000

Adventure Ho is launched! Tired of complicated RPGs with standard themes? Play Adventure Ho as the Moose, Drunk Monkey, Lizardman or Hamster and battle your way through 10 fiendish locations to rescue the Princess! Buy weapons and armour, upgrade your abilities and earn medals for game completion. Different in style to previous irRegularGames, hope you enjoy this one :)

GlueFO

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:48:00 +0000

New game GlueFO published on irRegularGames! Its loosely based on the classic asteroids, but control is with the mouse and there are a few other twists!

Veggie Fling

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 02:41:00 +0000

Vegetables. They must be flung. Check out the new irRegularGame here!

New game and flash sponsorship

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 13:40:00 +0000

I've just published a cool new flash game Sproing!. Check it out, its quite simple but fun and has an interesting control system. Looks like I will be getting game sponsorship from addictinggames.com, in addition to using mochiads on my own version (see below).

flashgamesponsorship.com is a useful resource for flash game developers if you are new to the sponsorship arena.

Flash game dev resources

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:46:00 +0000

Some useful resources if you are a flash game developer:

Mochiads (earn revenue from games, regardless of where they are hosted)
Mochibot (track which sites your swf is hosted on)
Flashrights (find out about copyright and file protection for swf's etc)

For instant submission game hosting sites check out:

Kongregate (revenue sharing)
Pepere (revenue sharing)
Newgrounds
Gamegum
Allgamesallfree

Third flash game

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:12:00 +0000

I've recently posted speed squid - my third flash game on squidsquid.com. The game is pretty simple, you have to grab prey as quickly as possible using 8 keystrokes corresponding to 8 squid limbs! It took a lot longer than expected to code, in part because it had more actual animation than my previous games. I've included a highscores system, based on this useful tutorial. I also decided to embed all my flash files with SWFObject, which has a number of advantages over using the standard Adobe embed tags, not least of which is getting around the annoying 'Activating Active Content' in later versions of IE (meaning your flash files will play straight away without needing to be 'activated' or whatever).

Aquatic animal personality test

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 23:05:00 +0000

I've just posted a new quiz on squidsquid - the aquatic animal personality test. One of the things I'm experimenting with here is having a "badge" type thing where people who take the test get some html code in a textbox to copy and paste onto their own blog or myspace page etc. The idea is that people want to share their result, and doing so creates links back to squidsquid (which is good for both traffic and search engine backlinks). Will see how it goes...

Squid evader game

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 21:07:00 +0000

I've pretty much stopped blogging about my development experiences here, as I don't have enough time and would rather spend it developing content on squidsquid. But for those of you who enjoy simple flash games, check out the squid evader game.

Flash Foray

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 21:01:00 +0000

I've just posted my first online flash game which I am pretty pleased with. Check it out!

How do websites become popular?

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 09:28:00 +0000

How can you promote your website (or blog) to get a ton of traffic? This is the million-dollar question: I certainly don't have all the answers, but I'm throwing my 2 cents worth in here in the context of my new site squidsquid.com.

Web directories

First off I decided to get my new site listed in some internet directories. Getting links from high ranking sites is good for two reasons - firstly you get the traffic directed from these sites, and secondly the links contribute to increasing your Google pagerank (Google pagerank is a measure of how 'important' your page is, and affects how highly your page will rank in results of a relevant Google search). So getting listed in popular web directories should be good. I targeted mainly humor directories and got my site listed on a few. The most successful of these has been Rawmeat.com, from which I've received about 100 visitors. I've submitted to i-am-bored.com several times (a very popular site - Alexa traffic rank), without success.

Search engines

Many sites get the majority of their traffic from search engines, and the majority of these searches are from Google (some estimates around 80%). Some search engines require you to submit your site to them, whereas others crawl the web to automatically detect content (Google is in this category). I took the time to submit my site to a few search engine directories, although I really have no idea what effect, if any, this has had. Its probably worth submitting to dmoz at least, but note that it may take several weeks or more to be included, followed by an additional wait to be included by partner sites that use the data (AOL Search, Google, Netscape Search, Yahoo Search).

For my particular type of site however, I'm not sure that search engines will necessarily be the biggest source of traffic. For example, people that are searching for information about giant squid are not likely to find a lot of useful material on squidsquid.com. However, comedy sites such as catsthatlooklikehitler.com (exactly what it sounds like!), Chuck Norris facts (e.g. "There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard. There is only another fist.") and rathergood.com (a bunch of silly flash videos etc) have relatively high Google pagerank and Alexa stats, yet it seems unlikely that most new visitors would be from search engine referrals (e.g. searching for 'hitler cat')! It seems more likely that these sites become popular through 'word of web' - blogs, emails, forums, social bookmarking etc. The whole complicated area of search engine optimisation (SEO) is of course also relevant here, but that's another kettle of fish (or pandora's box?). Anyway, I've been arguing that certain types of site such as my own are not likely to get a lot of search engine referral traffic (apart from searches by users already looking for a specific site e.g. "squidsquid").

As an aside, if the Google sandbox really exists, then I think I'm in it at present. The 'sandbox effect' is a theory that explains the observed phenomena that newly registered domains tend to receive lower pageranks for all but very specific searches (e.g. for the company name). Some people believe that this is due to an intentional Google filter, designed to slow down spam websites that abuse search engine optimisation techniques. Others believe it is simply a result of the way that Google indexes and ranks pages (and the time that this takes). In any case, the result is that a new domain will likely not rank very highly for relevant searches on Google for some period of time (from a few months up to a year), and there seems to be very little that can be done to avoid it. Because Google is the biggest source of search engine referrals, and my pages are currently low on most relevant results (perhaps because of the sandbox), it is difficult to estimate how much search engine traffic I might get in the future.

Web 2.0 and site promotion

'Web 2.0' is a popular buzzword at present - I use the term here to mean something like 'internet sites and services that let people collaborate and share information in new ways, with a focus on user production and control of content'. Well known examples are Wikipedia and Youtube. In terms of promoting your web content, the most relevant are news sites such as Digg and Reddit, and social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Technorati. Some of these sites are pretty cool, and you can find a lot of interesting stuff on them. The basic principle is that articles/links that are good (or interesting/ controversial/ 'sticky') will tend to be promoted as people 'vote' for them (by digging, bookmarking, tagging or whatever).

The table and graph below are the result of a quick bit of traffic research on Alexa, using 3 month averages. The list is just a sample of such sites, and is by no means exhaustive. Note that some of the less popular sites, such as Techtagg and Bluedot are pretty new, so their traffic rankings will likely increase. Interestingly, Fark only allows 5% of submitted stories to the front page i.e. it is strongly edited (although all of them are shown on totalfark - the paid version of the site). In this sense it is more similar to a traditional web directory type site as control of content is partially centralised, and in part controlled by users.

Site	Traffic rank	Reach per million users	Comments
digg.com	91	7,980
netscape.com	383	2,555	Traffic steadily declining for about 2 years
slashdot.org	223	4,610	Tech oriented
fark.com	889	1,175	Humor oriented
reddit.com	1,037	912.5
shoutwire.com	5,724	229
techtagg.com	70,771	16.5	Tech oriented
technorati.com	229	3,630	Social bookmarking, blogs
blinklist.com	3,481	360	Social bookmarking
bluedot.us	17,937	65	Social bookmarking

Of these sites, Digg is the most popular. It's easy to submit a story to Digg, and you will definitely get some traffic straight away from submission. Getting a lot of traffic, and ideally getting promoted to the front page is however another matter. Of note in the interesting article on the beginning stages of a high-traffic website is that the authors say that despite trying almost daily it took them months to get a story promoted to the front page of one of the sites listed above. There has been some debate about people 'gaming' the system, and claims that a small number of users effectively control a large portion of the promoted articles. Also read the amusing to 10 steps to guarantee you make the Digg front page which is simultaneously a sarcastic dig at Digg users and a largely accurate portrayal. Certainly if you have friends on the network, who are likely to read (and digg) your articles when you submit them, you are much more likely to get stories promoted. In general, if you want to get a lot of traffic from these web 2.0 sites, you probably need to do some research and tailor your content somewhat to match the sort of stories that tend to get promoted.

Other promotion options

Viral advertising - as defined at wikipedia: "The term 'viral advertising' refers to the idea that people will pass on and share interesting and entertaining content; this is often sponsored by a brand, which is looking to build awareness of a product or service. These viral commercials often take the form of funny video clips, or interactive Flash games, an advergame, images, and even text." Not something I've tried - yet - but it should be fairly easy to try out...
Paid advertising - depends on your budget, and the type of site you have. If you are selling a product, it might be an option, but if you are using a form of affiliate marketing to generate revenue (e.g. Google adsense), then this probably doesn't make sense.
Link exchanges - link exchanges are another way to increase both traffic and your pagerank (getting those all important inbound links). But it seems like this is difficult if you don't already have decent traffic to your site (i.e. who would want to exchange links with a low traffic site?).

Content is king?

There is an argument that if you create good or interesting enough content, then the visitors and traffic will follow. While I think this is true to an extent (and I agree with a focus on content over excessive promotion/optimisation etc), you also need some ways of getting your content out there in the first place. My two biggest sources of traffic so far (from the 9 at Yahoo, and BBC Radio1) were not from a direct result of my own promotion efforts i.e. I did not 'submit' these links, they were picked up in some other unknown way. I've also received a lot of traffic from links on blogs, forums and emails etc. Presumably this is because people found the content original/funny/sticky enough to want to share with other people. Don't spend too much time monitoring your traffic, search engine optimising, or submitting to directories, Digg etc, at the expense of creating good content on your site - whatever that might be!

Case study update

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 20:48:00 +0000

Hi Folks,

Thought I would give a quick update specifically on how my website experiment is progressing. Squidsquid.com has been on the web for 1 month. The first 3 weeks showed very modest traffic. I submitted the site to a few places and managed to get a few incoming links. Then on Sunday this week I was linked on the the presurfer which brought in my then biggest day to date of 192 unique visitors. On monday, to my amazement I was picked up by the 9 at yahoo - it was most surreal to see their 'news reporter' talking about squidsquid. Yahoo is consistently the most visited site on the internet (somewhat strangely to me because I don't know anyone who likes it). This resulted in a huge jump in traffic, as you can see below.

Traffic levels since monday have dropped sharply, but are still much higher than before. A number of message boards and blogs etc put up links as a result of the yahoo exposure. I'm also hoping that the traffic and incoming links will result in higher search engine rankings.

A few other points of interest:

My adsense CTR is very low. I think this is mostly a result of content that is not easy to advertise (do visitors really want to know more things about squid?). Consequently I've had only modest income, with by far the most revenue on the one big day of traffic.
My "email to a friend" box has been used about 45 times, which I think makes it quite worthwhile.
I have been staggered by the proportion of visitors that are from the US (see below).

I don't really understand it. The US is the most internet-ed nation and the biggest population of English as a first language speakers. But still, a quick population comparison reveals: USA about 300 million people, UK 60 million, Canada 30 million. Only 1.5% of visitors have been from the UK, 2% from Canada, a whopping 87% from the US, which is clearly disproportionate. One factor is certainly that most of my traffic was from the yahoo link, which is probably mostly visited my Americans.

Top beginner adsense tips

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 03:15:00 +0000

I'm pretty new to using adsense. However, I've picked up a few things so far, and here are my top tips and advice:

1. There is a lot of advice out there on ad placement, size etc. There are no hard and fast rules but the consensus seems to be:

Try to blend your ads with your site, use a color scheme that fits in.
If possible, insert ads in your content e.g. wrap your text around them. Ads that appear just at the top, bottom or side are easily ignored or subconsciously filtered.
If possible, use wide ads.
Consider using adlinks. If placed correctly, they can look more like menu items than ads, and are highly targetted to your content. Note that you will only receive money if users click on the results of the adlinks page (i.e. two clicks required).

2. To begin with, adsense delivers only cost-per-click (CPC) ads. This means you only get revenue when a visitor clicks on an ad. To also receive cost-per-impression ads, an advertiser has to choose to advertise on your site. If you have only CPC ads, and a low clickthrough rate, you wont get much revenue even with good traffic. Interestingly, this very blog started receiving some cost-per-impression ads after only about 1 week of being up. My website squidsquid.com has received no cost-per-impression ads, despite having considerably more traffic. It seems a little unlikely that an advertiser chose to advertise on my relatively unknown blog, but maybe. The only other explanation is that some adwords advertisers have an automated system of delivering cost-per-impression ads, dependant on the content (i.e. the advertiser 'automatically chooses' to advertise cost-per-impressions on your site).

3. Depending on the type of site you have, it may be difficult to target your ads (e.g. I have a comedy site about giant squid - adsense ads for "giant squid on ebay" are unlikely to have high clickthrough rates)! However, if you cant or dont want to change your content overly (and I dont think you should), then other factors that have a strong influence on the content of the ads are alt tags, your page title and your page filename. These can all be used to target the ads more appropriately.

4. Further reading:

Scan through this longish article for some tips (there are quite a few advertising plugs for products there also).
Check out this reasonably good article about how to increase your blogger traffic and adsense revenue.

Beginner PHP programming tips

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 20:00:00 +0000

I'm going to list a few disparate things I've come across that I've found useful in beginning php programming. This article should be useful for people with a background in programming but with little php experience.

First off, php is a scripting language. Its free, open-source, integrates easily with apache (the web's most common web server), and is supported on many web hosts. After installing php (see this earlier post), I started with this good introductory article to get me started and familiar with the syntax etc.

Sending mail with php

Sending mail with php is easy, via the mail() function. However, if your mailserver requires SMTP authentication (and it probably does) - then this won't work. For this, try the free PHPmailer. I got up and running with this by simply following installation instructions and modifying the example on the sourceforge project page. You can also send HTML formatted mail, add attachments etc.

Validating (and remembering) checkbox input

I have a page on my site (how to tell if you are part squid) with a number of checkboxes. One thing I wanted to do was ensure that all the boxes were checked (either yes/no) when the user submitted (or else show an error message). Testing whether they are checked is easy enough, but here is the nice code I found to save the settings for all the checkboxes that were checked, so the user doesn't lose that data if they have to resubmit:

Passing variables between pages

I'm no expert on this one. However, I wanted to get some information from a form, process it, then pass it on to another php page. I believe that the POST and GET methods can be used for passing information from a form, but not for passing variables that you have defined yourself(?). A way I found to do this is to use the session_start function. The documentation and information I could find about this was a little confusing (I probably need to read a decent book) - but I did manage to get it working. Two important points - you need to call session_start on both (or all) pages you want to use session variables, and you must call it before your html (or any header information like doc type).

See an example of session_start working at find out your squid name (I pass the user's squidname from the first page to fill in the text box on the second page).

Server side includes and php?

I've set my website up to use server-side includes (SSI), mainly for the menu and my adsense ads etc. SSI is very useful for content that is replicated on many pages - typically the banner or menu information. It means that this information can be stored in one seperate text file and included by the server in every page in which it is used, e.g.:

The normal way to configure a web server to look for SSI is to name the files with a .shtml extension (this means the server doesn't have to check every html file for SSI, which would be inefficient). But I would also like to use SSI in my php files - does anyone know if this is possible? If you ran your own webserver this would be easy enough, just configure it to also check .php files for SSI. But you dont have this option if your site is hosted by someone else, so I'm not sure if this can be done.

Choosing a web host

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 20:46:00 +0000

Choosing a host is a bit of a nightmare. If you have a recommendation from someone you trust, then that's a good starting point. Otherwise the problems you face are an overwhelming array of choices, and a market flooded with advertising/ misinformation/ unscrupulous companies. Here are a few do's and dont's:

Don't pay any attention to "top 100" type webhost listing sites. Its all advertising - companies just pay to get on these lists.
Do look around for genuine comments from users on forums etc. If you find a lot of negative comments about a particular host, stay clear. A lot of positive comments is good, but be aware that some of these could be fake comments. Use judgement.
Don't focus exclusively on the numbers that hosts advertise. You might be tempted to look for the highest hosting/traffic limits to cost ratio (i.e. biggest bang for your buck!). This is exactly what many hosts are counting on - they unrealistically inflate their numbers to attract customers. 5000 GB traffic for $5 a month could not actually be supported by a host.
Do look for a decent server uptime (99.5% +).
Do run a whois on the host. Has the company been around for long? If not, you might be increasing your risk. Many webhosts come and go in a short time - its a competitive market.
Do test out a prospective host's support. Give them a call/ email and ask them something about hosting - how long did they take to respond and were they helpful?
Do consider what you will really need. How much traffic do you anticipate? How much space do you need? Remember that with most hosts you can upgrade to a higher package if traffic etc exceeds your initial expectations. Also consider what server-side support you want (php, ssi, whatever...). Dont forget to check out what versions the host is running.
Do some more research. Search for "choosing a web host" or similar - read some articles (e.g. how to choose a web host).

Most of all, look for a company that you think is honest and reliable. It's much more important to find a host that will respond to your support requests, accurately charge you for services, and stay in business, than a host that offers high traffic and storage limits for low cost.

I personally ended up going with hostgator. I chose them for 2 main reasons - positive reviews on forums, and the fact that they have some sensible advice about choosing a webhost here (some of which is repeated in the above). I can't say if they are the best company out there, but so far I am happy, and would recommend them. They provide good site stats, and my html and php stuff worked first time. I have a couple of issues using their web-based email but that's relatively minor.

Blogsoldiers: A partial revision

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 04:29:00 +0000

After receiving 3 comments and 1 email today from blogsoldiers surfers (thanks guys) I have to at least partially retract my previous post. So it seems that there are soldiers out there who actually read other people's blogs, while they are building up credit for their own...

I still suspect that there are users who dont read the other blogs. One reason for this is that a small number of blogs showed up multiple times after I had surfed only 50-100 sites using blogsoldiers. These bloggers must surely either buy credits or sit there clicking and not reading other people's blogs. However, out of about 25 referrals today from blogsoldiers, I got 4 responses. That's actually not a bad conversion rate. Of course, the title of my post was deliberately provocative - I claimed that blogsoldiers didn't work knowing that I would have blogsoldiers traffic directed to me. Would I (or others) get this many (not that 4 is that many!) different responders to less provocative posts?

A more important question is probably whether it is worth the investment of time to browse other people's blogs in order to have some traffic directed at your own. Would it be more beneficial to focus on writing good quality content, or to advertise in other ways? If you already have a decent readership, then a focus on content makes sense. But what about when you are trying to build up a readership?

I dont have any definite answers here, but I can say that blogsoldiers does indeed generate traffic, with at least some of the readers being prepared to take the time to read and respond to your content. Its probably a reasonable option if you dont have many readers, or if you enjoy randomly browsing other people's blogs.

An aside: Does Blog Soldiers work?

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 18:23:00 +0000

In short, I would have to say no. First of all, what is Blog Soldiers? Its a way of driving "readers" to your blog. From their homepage:

"You view other member's Blogs and in return other members view your Blog. Every 2 member Blogs you visit, 1 member will view your Blog, all Free."

Sounds good huh? Although I had reservations, I decided I should check it out. So what happens is you sign up for a free account, then start viewing other member's blogs. You have to stay on their blog for a minimum of 20s before an option to browse to another blog appears. In return, you are guaranteed that for every 2 blogs you view, someone else will view your blog. Easy traffic you might say? Yes, easy traffic. But low quality traffic. The problem of course is that the people who are viewing your blog are really just doing so in order to increase traffic to their own blog. I tried to surf with an open mind, with the intention that if I visited an interesting blog I would read it, leave a comment, or maybe even bookmark it. But I found very little that was of interest to me. That's not to say all the blogs were necessarily bad (some were), but that they weren't my cup of tea. But I suspect that most blog soldier surfers dont even do this - they simply sit there clicking on the 'next' button whenever the 20s timer runs down, without even reading the blogs. All the while increasing their own credits so that they can get a bunch of people not reading their blog!

Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic. But my own experience was that I did indeed generate hits to this very blog from Blog Soldiers, but that not a single soldier left a comment or browsed to squidsquid.com from here - indicating that the readers can't have been very engaged. Of course I might just have a genuinely uninteresting blog, but I hope instead that most of the soldiers weren't really interested from the outset.

If anyone else has had a different experience with Blog Soldiers, I'd be interested to know...

Domain name registration

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 06:17:00 +0000

Domain name registration is easy and cheap. First of course, you have to decide what domain name you want. Today this can be a problem - a great many domain names you might think of are already taken. Some of these are taken by legitimate sites, but annoyingly many sites may be instances of domain parking (or variants like cybersquatting or typosquatting). Still, you have to come up with something - I chose squidsquid because it seemed catchy (a lot of variants like giantsquid.com, megasquid.com, bluesquid.com etc are already in use).

Many hosts offer "free" registration as part of their hosting package. However, you should consider registering your domain name independantly. This is because if you let your host do it, you cannot be sure what information they will enter in the WHOIS. For all practical purposes, whoever's information is in the whois owns that domain (you can check who owns any domain by running a whois and entering checkdomain.com). If your host enters their own information they might pressure you to stay with them, or there might be complications if they go out of business. So for piece of mind, I recommend registering your domain name yourself. Then when you sign up with a host, you just need to change the DNS servers to point at your host, which is pretty easy.

There are many specialist companies for domain registration - I ended up going with namecheap. It cost only $8.88 USD for 1 year, the process was quick and easy and I have no complaints.

Installing development tools

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 21:17:00 +0000

Hi all,

The next step I took after coming up with my initial website ideas was to install some stuff on my machine that would allow me to start building a local version of my site. Note that all the programs I have used so far are freely available, and that I'm running Windows XP. So, what am I using:

1. Programmer's notepad. I love this program. Its a free, open source text editor. It recognises tons of files types (css, html, php etc) and displays formatting appropriate to the file type. All my files are hand-coded using this program.

2. Apache web server, version 2.2.3. Apache is open source and the most widely used web server on the internet. I used this excellent guide on how to install the apache web server on windows. Followed the instructions with no installation problems. The only problem I have at present is that I can't work out how to view the locally installed manual files! I think I'm missing something obvious here - maybe someone can help. If I open one of the html files in the manual directory (C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\manual) the following is all that displays in my browser (both firefox and IE):

URI: caching.html.en Content-Language: en Content-type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

Seems like the manual is offered in different languages but I don't know why it doesn't just show the english version for me (I assume it would try to use the browser's language setting). Well, no big deal anyway, I can always find manual information online if necessary.

3. Php 4.4.4. Again I followed the excellent tutorial on thesitewizard How to install and configure php4 to run with apache on windows. I ran into a problem regarding compatiblity of apache 2.2.3 and php 4.4.4 on windows, which was not covered by the tutorial. Found a fix after some searching (sorry I can't remember exactly where!) but it involved using some different dll's (one is php4apache2.dll I think) and a couple of small configuration changes. Also had to download the Microsoft Visual c++ redistributable package so the dll's would run. After that I browsed to http://localhost/phpinfo.php and it worked! Very pleased to have a web server with scripting language installed and running on my machine - with a minimum of fuss.

4. The other thing I needed was an FTP client - for uploading to the host when I had one. I'm using LeechFTP. It's an older FTP client and doesn't have all the new features or nice interface of some newer ones. On the other hand it's free and does the job for the relatively small amount of use I give it. The only real problem I've noticed is that if you upload a new version of an existing file, sometimes the result is that you get a strange mixture of the old and new file on the server! Anyone else come across this problem? I actually seem to remember the same thing happening with a different FTP client in the past. My workaround is to ensure that I delete the file on the server before uploading the new version. If anyone can recommend a free alternative to Leech FTP, I'd be interested to know.

That's it - a total of 4 programs installed on a windows xp laptop and I have a functioning development environment. Next entry will talk about choosing a host and domain name registration.

Initial Concept

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 05:27:00 +0000

You must have heard some success stories of people making money from websites (and blogs) through google adsense content-targetted advertising (there are alternatives to adsense, but it seems to be the current market leader so I'll be sticking to it for now). After hearing such stories myself I had to wonder if I could do it. I have a background in programming, a little website development experience and also a lot of (mostly academic) writing experience. So it seemed like something I might be able to do...

After deciding I wanted to set up a site, the next question of course is what would be the purpose and content of the website? I decided I wanted some interactive content (so I could try my hand at writing some scripts), and also that it would be a comedy/humor kind of thing. I also have an idea for a more standard services-type site, but that's on hold for the time being. After coming up with a few disparate ideas, I hit on a theme. The site is best described by visiting it, but in short it is written from the perspective of a giant squid who is communicating with humans via the internet. Ahem. Yes - you read that correctly. The humor won't be for everyone, but I'm happy with it right now. Regardless of the content - you can see that at present it is a small site with simple design, with a few server side (php) scripts.

My only real advice at this stage of the process (and all subsequent stages) is to write down every half-decent idea when you have it. It doen't matter if you don't have a way draw them all together or to use them immediately.

Next I will turn from initial concept to the first steps of implementation.

Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Gordon Simpson) — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 05:25:00 +0000

My website has been up and running for about a week. Check it out at www.squidsquid.com. So far I've had about 100 visitors. I have quite a few plans for extensions and new content etc. The next few blog entries will cover what I did to get the site where it is now. Once I've caught up with that the blog entries will be current - covering site changes/additions, amount of traffic (and revenue - if any!), and promotion activities etc.