TeKnowMagic's Blog

Smartphone version of Tetris can also use touch screen

2008-05-04T21:11:00.003-04:00

The smartphone version for the tetris game, can make use of a touch screen if you cell phone has one of those. Then you will be able to drag the pieces while they are falling to the bottom. It was a casuality, Since I converted the application to smartphone, resized screens, changed menus etc, but never removed the drag and drop support, it seems the "error" here is a good thing!,
well then.. "mea culpa" and enjoy!

Thanks
Leo

ok.. donations then..

2008-05-04T21:00:00.003-04:00

I have been asked about ten times or more, about how to donate some money, ok, I added the "donate" button, using paypal. So donations are welcome if you feel it worth it.
PS: it seems that responding quickly to your questions/suggestions really worth it. :)

thanks
Leo

New versions for Smartphone available now.

2008-03-31T04:47:00.002-04:00

Hello

I have also created smartphone version for 3 of the games, Sokoban, Click and Slide, and Tetris. You can download them now from the site.

Cheers
Leo

New checkers version!

2008-03-31T04:36:00.003-04:00

Hello
I have just added a new Checkers version, I just called checkers 2.0, it has a new AI level, and also some internal improvements, besides, now you can select to play with American or International rules!

enjoy!

Leo

Typo fixed on Color Lines

2007-12-04T20:43:00.000-05:00

The last uploaded game "Color Lines for Pocket PC" had a typo on the installer, causing the application to be installed in "Programms/Games" instead of "Programs/Games" that was fixed and the new installer is ready for download.

Enjoy!

Leo

Two more games to the list: color lines and snake

2007-11-28T00:51:00.001-05:00

As promised, each month will have some new stuff, the new stuff for december are Snake and Color lines, a remake of those classic games.
Check them here
More comming soon.
bye!

Tetris just added

2007-11-11T20:44:00.000-05:00

I just added tetris, i know, i know, tetris is an old game, but it thought it was ok to add my version of this game for pocket pc, besides, it has a new thing, since we are in a pocket pc and we have a touch screen we can use the stylus (finger??) to drag the piece and move it left and right while is moving down. check it!
good luck!
more games comming!

Some updates in the pocket pc games

2007-10-30T04:14:00.000-04:00

As you might noticed we have updated our games. And updated the files for those games (cab installers)

Changes:

--Sokoban--
* By mistake a debug version was loaded on the site, with only 2 levels, from about a week ago now you can play 10 levels again.
* A bug in one of the levels was fixed.

--Checkers, Othello, Sokoban--
* ZIP file contained cabs for different platforms, now you have only 1 cab file, (is a .net app, you dont need more than one)

2000 visits daily and raising!

2007-10-30T04:05:00.000-04:00

After one month of SEO and submitting some of our Pocket pc games to a few sites and directories all over the internet, TeKnowMagic have reached 2000 visits daily (avg) and a peak of 3567 visits, with more than 800 new clients coming to the site every day.

In total more than 65 000 people have downloaded our games and more are coming every day. And that's only the beginning, new games each and new tools will be coming each month so the bar will keep raising right?

Currently we have chess, checkers, sokoban, click and slide, othello,(all for pocket pc) and a visual studio .net tool, next month is comes with: checkers 2.0, tetris, and the special of the month: podcast submitter (A FREE SEO TOOL!!!!)

Levels wanted for sokoban (genius edition)

2007-10-30T03:58:00.000-04:00

We are glad to announce that teknowmagic is about to launch Sokoban Genius Edition, a selection of very-hard-to-beat levels developed by our users, with more than 50 levels, this Genius edition will also bring some new graphics, but just some.. not much since this is not Starcraft 2 and the best thing about sokoban is the simplicity.

Just one thing left to say.

If you beat the 50 levels of sokoban genius edition, you will get all TeKnowMagic's Games and source code + games not yet released.

Good luck

Avoid hotlinking and get more traffic

2007-10-06T07:08:00.000-04:00

The real thing is that since I run a team of coders and most of my incomes come from programming, I did not pay attention to hosting statistics. But then I decided to put Google ads on the site so I started looking to those numbers; especially bandwidth and page views.

The facts: I had a folder with zip files on my site, and on any page where I was offering a game for download a link was there to just click and get the file.

The problem: Many forums and sites started putting links to my files directly, not to my pages, so somebody was drinking up all my bandwidth, without even watching my site. That was unacceptable, don't you think? Having hosted my site in a Shared .NET hosting with IIS I couldn't play with IIS as on a dedicated server, and it was not Apache so, no .htaccess, right?

The solution: Being myself a .NET coder the solution was quick, I coded a page called download.aspx that allow clients to download files from my hosting, by clicking a button. That button just writes the file content to the page's output stream. Of course, I had to move files to a new location and also take care about some security measures.

What happened?
It worked just fine, right after updated the site, statistics went up, I almost duplicated the amount of visits and page views, while saving 45% of the bandwidth. That was translated to more people getting my games, more links to my site, more PR, more hits, more Google revenues and so on, so you just do the math.

My advice: Avoid hotlinking, get more traffic.

Thanks
Leo

My First Day With Adsense, just cool

2007-10-04T08:01:00.000-04:00

Hearing all that about making money with adsense I tried myself, I had about 300-500 visits each day to my site, and about 200-300 unique visitors each day, so... why not. So I went to Google and setup the adsense account. You can’t imagine my surprise when I noticed the first 10 cents coming through after 30 minutes and the first 3 dollars during the first day. I was amazed. The thing is that adsense works really nice. It took me some time to setup the correct ads and keywords. You have to check some things when using adsense.

1) Check your keywords, if your site is about board games, set “board games” as a keyword, if you only set “board” you can get ads about surfing skateboards or about intel boards. Really… it is quite important to keep ads focused, people who visit your site have a reason for that; they are interested in something that might be in your site. And it seems quite clear that a guy looking for “board games” like chess, checkers etc, will not (most likely) be suddenly interested in a hardware piece right?

2) Change the colors and border of your ads to match your site design, don’t show “green and blue” ads if your site use a different set of color. People nowadays are programmed to “skip” those “gree and blue” ads. But please, neither hide the links nor lie to the users, or Google will close your account.

3) Position your ads in an optimal way, you can use the adsense channel to keep track, depending on the design of your site/blog you might experience a huge difference (CPR) between your ads at top, left, right, bottom, etc.

The funny part: My own page for a Reversi/Othello game, was showing up ads related to Shakespeare!

Leo
TeKnowMagic President

Raising visits

2007-10-01T06:50:00.000-04:00

Some weeks ago, maybe some months ago, I uploaded the first games to my site. As a coder and not as a marketing guy, I thought that was more than enough to share my code with the community. But... no visits, I knew that I had to submit my site and pages and games to directories etc, but I am just too lazy to do that. Even when I coded myself 3 automatic submission tools that SEO people use all over the world. (And yes, they are good :))

So I decided to try and submitted 3-4 games to www.freeppcgames.com, and in 1 day, I had to change my hosting; yes, I had to change it! I was using a free hosting account and keeping files (games) for download in gigafiles.co.uk, they just offer 1gb for free monthly well, in just 1 day my bandwidth for downloads was consumed. FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME!!!

I felt happy, well, not my pocket since I had then to pay for a better hosting, so I moved to seekdotnet.com, with 60gigs/month and more space. I did all that more than 2 weeks ago, and I am still getting about 400 visits daily to my site and an average of 255 NEW USERS every day. More than 5000 people have downloaded my games; I think this is just great!

I am not doing any SEO work yet, but I think that when done correctly, a good site design and the proper set of ads can bring you some money. I am willing to raise my site to more than 2000 visits daily. And I will, the reason (one of them): easy, I will give for free one of the best SEO tools ever seen. I coded some of them, so it is time to show my own tool, and I really don’t want to sell it. I want to share it!

So, just wait :)

Thanks!
Leo
TeKnowMagic President

TeKnowMagic is blogging

2007-09-10T01:32:00.001-04:00

We are on the blog road!
Yes... we are blogging now, for several months we have been changing from one host to another, and we decided to settle down, so, instead of installing the best-updated-state-of-the-art blog engine in our site; we just opened a blog here in blogger, because is amazing.... yes, it is. We don't need a news section in our site and we don't have to open a tips and tricks section neither, I can publish them here. Just keep a site for what a site is, right?

So, what's new with teknowmagic?
Well, we have done lot of things, we finished a lot of projects on Rentacoder we have ranked now about the #250 out of 188.000+ and keep moving to the top 100! (then we will see...)

But if you check our site, and will see some new stuff, we just added more free games to our product sections, a chess game and a sokoban game, both of them for Pocket PC using .NET Compact Framework (yes, we are a .NET company, with .NET games... surpriesed?!)

As always, all our products are free - or at least what we have now :P - and most of them comes with source code, so take a look and let us know what you think.