Craig Soup Blog

Debauched - A Vegas Story

Craig — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:23:18 +0000

According to The Associated Press, Las Vegas tourism officials have decided to stuff almost half the population of Cranfills Gap, Texas into a jet and fly them to Sin City for a free five-day vacation. Up to 120 residents of the small, Texas town (pop. 358), including anyone who is under twenty-one and able to get the time off, have set aside December 13-17 for this momentous occasion.

The citywide vacation is part of a marketing effort to lure more of middle America into the deserts of Nevada to promote self-indulgence, debauchery, and legal prostitution. Tourism officials looked all across the nation for the right town before deciding to extend their generous offer to “The Gap.” This particular marketing ploy is going to be a part of the “What happens in Vegas, says in Vegas” campaign, and in order to prove their slogan wrong, a camera crew will be following the Cranfills Gappians around to record everything they do. (Note: Amazingly, the word “Gappians” does not have the little red underline beneath it that denotes a misspelled word.)

With half the town gone, I can’t help but wonder what the other half (made up largely of minors) is going to do with their time. Perhaps they’ll practice a little debauchery of their own. With Ma and Pa off gallavanting in Vegas, perhaps the kiddos will have a chance to turn Cranfills Gap into Sin City, Part 2.

Everybody wins!

“Free” Credit Report

Craig — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:01:08 +0000

Don’t EVER go to freecreditreport.com unless you enjoy being robbed. They lure you in with a FREE report, and then in little tiny letters that nobody ever notices, they tell you that they’re signing you up for a free trial for Triple Advantage credit monitoring, and if you don’t call to cancel before the free trial is up, they start charging you $15/month. They’ve been charging me this for several months now, and I just now noticed it. So I called to figure out the problem, and after they tried to sell me more products, I had to tell them that I was never interested in doing business with them again. And she assured me that I had no grounds for a refund for the $90 they’ve stolen from me so far.

Why have we turned into a society where we have to trick people into giving you money in order to make a profit? Why has the human race stooped so low that we can no longer trust the people and the businesses that surround us?

I want to encourage everybody out there to stop doing business with companies who don’t even respect you enough to tell you the truth without cleverly disguising it.

And if YOU are a business person, if you own a company, I implore you to restore my faith in humanity by being honest. And in my estimation, hiding a $15/month charge among a deluge of tiny paragraphs of text is NOT honesty.

Growing Traffic to Your Blog

Craig — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:49:31 +0000

When you first start building a blog, the temptation to spend all of your time increasing traffic is almost unbearable. However, if you want to create a successful blog, the most important thing you can do for it in the beginning is to just start creating some solid content. If your website has good, solid content that’s worth coming back to, then eventually someone will notice and word will spread.

On the other hand, once you’ve created some solid content, you’ll want to start exploring different ways of building traffic to your blog. There are endless techniques for doing so, and there are entire blogs devoted to teaching these techniques. But you have to start somewhere.

Well, for my School of Flash blog, I recently started exploring some of these techniques, and in just a couple of weeks, I’ve been able to boost my traffic from 20 visits a day to over 400 visits a day. If I was able to do this in just a couple weeks, imagine how much more traffic I’ll be able to pull in over a few months and over a couple of years.

So, how did I do it? Well, it’s difficult to point at any one thing, considering I’ve been trying so many, but I did want to share with you a couple of things I’ve done to boost my traffic so much. Following is a list of techniques that will help you get the traffic you’re looking for.

Submit your site to search engines. This is step numero uno! If search engines don’t know about your site, then how do you ever expect to achieve any organic traffic? If you want to know if Google has recognized your site yet, simply do a search on Google for your domain name (i.e., search for “craigsoup.com”). If you get no results, then your site hasn’t been recognized yet. So take the time to submit your website to all the search engines and directories you can get your hands on.
Include a link to your RSS feed. Make it a big link! This is how you get people to continue coming back to your site. I would suggest using Feedburner for your RSS feeds. It’s a wonderful free tool, and it also allows you to build forms to get your readers to subscribe using their email addresses.
Build traffic through social media. This is the one that gave my site a big boost. Through a combination of Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and MySpace, I’ve been heavily marketing my site. Every time I create a new blog post, I submit the post to Digg, and this has brought me an increasing flow of traffic. Another blogger even saw one of these posts on Digg and linked to it on his own blog (which is why it’s so important to create QUALITY content)!
My latest monumental surge of traffic, though, has come from StumbleUpon. Just like with Digg, every time I create a new blog post, I go to the page for that post and vote for that page on StumbleUpon. I did this last night when I posted a new tutorial on ActionScript 3.0 Masks, and this morning I woke up to find that I had a record number of visitors for the day . . . and that was at 8 IN THE MORNING!
Post regularly. If you’re a sporadic poster, don’t bother. It will be practically impossible to build any sort of steady traffic if you only post once a month. Try to post AT LEAST twice a week. Every day, if possible!

There are hundreds of other things you can do to build traffic, but this is a good start. What have you done to increase traffic to your website?

Google Analytics - Two Thumbs Way Up

Craig — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:21:46 +0000

Until recently, I’ve always used the website tracking tools offered by my webhost. For the most part, they were decent tools, but I have several domains on the same server, and it was difficult to weed through all the information to figure out how each domain was doing individually.

Enter Google Analytics.

I had certainly heard of Google Analytics (Who hasn’t?), and I had even heard that it was a fantastic tool, but for some reason, I had always assumed that all analytics tools were the same.

I was wrong. After using GA for only two days, I can already tell that it’s going to be much more informative, much easier to use tool than I could have imagined. So, why is it so handy?

1. First of all, it allows me to view each of my domains separately. Might not sound too exciting, I know, but after a year of using the tools I’ve been using, you’d be excited, too!

2. It’s remarkably easy to use. The different categories of statistics are easy to access and easy to understand. And if you DON’T understand a certain statistic, you can easily click on the “About this report” link on the left side of the page, and it will explain everything for you.

3. It’s a great teacher. Along with explanations of what each report means, Google Analytics also gives you suggestions on how you can improve your stats.

4. Easy link tracking. GA has an amazing “site overlay” tool that opens up your site in a popup window and shows you visually how often each link was tracked (see picture below).

All in all, Google Analytics is an amazing tool that anybody with a website can benefit from (not just web designers). I avoided it for so long (for no good reason), and with my new Flash blog (http://www.SchoolOfFlash.com), I finally decided to swallow the red pill, and I’m glad I did.

New Flash Blog

Craig — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:05:05 +0000

As some of you may have noticed, things have been pretty quiet on this blog lately. Well, they’re about to get even quieter, but for a good reason.

I recently started a new blog called School of Flash, and I intend to put a lot of effort into making this new blog into a valuable resource for anyone interested in Flash. So head on over and let me know what you think.

Also, let me know if there are any questions you have or any tutorials you would like to see.

Microsoft and “Suspicious” Websites

Craig — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:00:59 +0000

Just when I was beginning to think that I couldn’t hate Microsoft any worse, they have to go and prove me wrong.

In an effort to “help” protect us from bad websites, Microsoft’s latest release of the worst browser on the planet (Internet Explorer 7) has started randomly labeling sites as “suspicious” in order to kill commerce.

Okay, so they’re not really trying to kill commerce, and I’m sure their labeling tactics aren’t RANDOM, but from what I’ve read, there seems to be no common thread among people who have had their websites labeled as “suspicious” by Internet Destroyer . . . I mean Explorer.

And the real kicker is this . . . If Microsoft screws up (which seems to happen more often than not) and labels your site as “suspicious”, then you have to go to their website, fill out a form, and wait around for them to “check out” your website to make sure everything is alright.

Get over yourself, Microsoft, and stop trying to “help” people who don’t need it!

GET FIREFOX, EVERYONE!!

Wireless Connection Finally Fixed

Craig — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:16:15 +0000

For ten months I’ve lived in this house, and for ten months I’ve had an internet connection that has been about as reliable as the first generation release of any Microsoft product on the market. At times I’ve been driven to the brink of insanity by a wireless connection that sometimes won’t stay alive long enough to download an MP3. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve shut down and restarted my wireless router, I would own more islands than Keanu Reeves and Marlon Brando put together (which, I believe, adds up to about two)!

And this morning was the last straw. As I logged on to start the workday, my lousy ActionTec router refused to stay connected for more than 30 seconds at a time. I restarted the router over and over, and every time I restarted it, it began working again . . . but only for a very limited time.

After an hour of this, I felt my brain swelling inside my skull like a volcano ready to pop. Over the past few months, I had tried everything that it made sense to try. I tried restarting routers, tightening cables, and I even purchased signal boosters, all to no avail.

So, since common sense didn’t seem to get me anywhere, I tried the only thing left to try. I knocked it over.

Okay, I didn’t KNOCK it over, but I did take it off the upright stand it had been sitting on and set it down on its belly. And guess what! It worked! Ever since I set it on its belly, I haven’t had a single problem, and my internet connection has been chugging along faster than ever!

And it’s all kind of strange, considering that I had a similar problem with my xBox 360. As soon as I set it in the upright position (which it was supposedly designed to be able to do), I started having major problems.

The moral of this story? If you purchase anything that comes with an upright stand, throw it away. Electronics like to lay on their bellies.

To the City

Craig — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:37:58 +0000

While watching the Red River Shootout this weekend, I decided to exercise my creative muscles a little bit and play around with Photoshop. This is what I came up with:

The design is just a compilation of images I downloaded, sliced apart, threw together, and added some color changes to. It was actually inspired by a similar piece that I had seen on the internet, but for the life of me, I can’t seem to find the image again.

Anyways, the moral of the story here is that it’s good for the creative mind to take a break from “work” every now and then in order to create something just for the sake of creating something! It reminds us that we love our jobs, that even though we may get bogged down in the business side of things every now and then, we’re still designers, and we love what we do!!

Flash Forward Boston

Craig — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:10:58 +0000

Well, the Flash Forward conference is in full force, and Boston is beautiful! The weather here is absolutely perfect right now! The sun is out in full force but without the oppressive heat of late-summer Texas. In this weather, I’d be just as comfortable in a light sweater as in a short sleeve polo . . . which is fortuitous, because all I brought was short sleeve polos and t-shirts!

The sessions so far have been great! Thus far I’ve been to sessions on Flash games, the SWX data format for Flash, and website branding on social media sites (digg, twitter, MySpace, etc.)

One quick note on MySpace . . . Even though it’s ugly, bulky, and downright icky, MySpace can still be a very powerful tool for driving traffic to your website. There, I said it. Enough about MySpace!

I’m really excited about the next session I’ll be going to. It’s called “One Man Bands - Flash Animators Going it Alone.” Aaron Simpson will be the speaker, and I can’t wait to hear what he has to say.

More later!

Shipping Off to Boston

Craig — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 14:23:24 +0000

I’m catching a plane to Boston this afternoon for the Flashforward Conference, which starts tomorrow. Telling my wife goodbye this morning was harder than I thought it would be, but it’s only for a couple of days, and I’m sure it will go by in a flash (pun intended)!

The speakers at this week’s conference include Aral Balkan, founder of OSFlash; Chris Georgenes, an amazing Flash animator and the owner of Mudbubble design and animation studio (can’t wait for this one); Seb Lee-Delisle, a well known Flash game programmer and animator; Erik Natzke, an amazing designer; and many more!

With such a great lineup, I can’t help but get excited about this! Plus, it’ll be a lot of fun meeting up with other Flashers out there and finding out what other people are doing with Flash and other Adobe products.

I’ll keep you updated!